LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf _H*L5l 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



<Sngli0l) JtUn of betters 

EDITED BY JOHN MOELEY 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



BY 



JOHN NICHOL, LL.D., M.A, Balliol, Oxon 

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW 







JUL 



NEW YORK 



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HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1892 



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Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



PREFATOKY NOTE 

The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's 
life and attempt to estimate his genius rely on frequently 
renewed study of his work, on slight personal impres- 
sions — " vidi tantum " — and on information supplied by 
previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen 
literary legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the 
most reliable. Every critic of Carlyle must admit as 
constant obligations to Mr. Froude as every critic of By- 
ron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of 
these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses 
from which every student will continue to draw. Each 
has, in a sense, made his subject his own, and each has 
been similarly arraigned. 

I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to in- 
dignation at the persistent, often virulent attacks directed 
against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of 
faith and the defective reticence that often belongs to 
genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. 
Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on Sir 
Walter Scott requires no supplement: it should be re- 
membered that he acted with the most ample authority ; 
that the restrictions under which he was at first entrusted 
with the MSS. of the Reminiscences and the Letters and 
Memorials (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publi- 



vi PREFATORY NOTE. 

cation) were withdrawn ; and that the initial permission 
to select finally approached a practical injunction to com- 
municate the whole. The worst that can be said is that, 
in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as 
to what should be made public of the details of his do- 
mestic life may have been somewhat obscured ; but, if so, 
it was a weakness easily hidden from a devotee. 

My acknowledgments are due for several of the Press 
comments which appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, 
more especially that of the St. James's Gazette, giving 
the most philosophical brief summary of his religious 
views which I have seen ; and for the kindness of Dr. 
Eugene Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in re- 
vising my proof-sheets, and supplying me with numerous 
valuable hints, especially in matters relating to German 
History and Literature. I have also to thank the Editor 
of the Manchester Guardian for permitting me to repro- 
duce the substance of my article in its columns of Febru- 
ary, 1881. That article was largely based on a contribu- 
tion on the same subject, in 1859, to Mackenzie's Imperial 
Dictionary of Biography. 

I may add that in the distribution of material over the 
comparatively short space at my command, I have en- 
deavoured to give prominence to facts less generally 
known, and passed over slightly the details of events 
previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. 
Carlyle and the incidents of her death. To her inner 
history I have only referred in so far as it had a direct 
bearing on her husband's life. As regards the itinerary 
of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it 
might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to 
have a short record of the places where the author sought 
his " studies " for his greatest work. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 



PAGE 

Introductory Summary 1 



CHAPTER II. 

1795-1826. 

ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH 13 

CHAPTER III. 

1826-1834. 

Craigenputtock — (From Marriage to London) . . „ . . . 43 

« 

CHAPTER IV. 

1834-1842. 

Cheyne Row— (To Death of Mrs. Welsh) 65 

CHAPTER V. 

1842-1853. 
Cheyne Row — (To Death of Carlyle's Mother) 89 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VI. 

1853-1866. 

PAGE 

The Minotaur — (To Death of Mrs. Carlyle) 117 

CHAPTER VII. 

1866-1881. 

Decadence 140 

CHAPTER VIII. 
^Carlyle as Man of Letters, Critic, and Historian . . . 166 

CHAPTER IX. 
Carlyle's Political Philosophy 194 

CHAPTER X. 
Ethics — Predecessors — Influence 221 

APPENDIX. 
On Carlyle's Religion 255 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 

CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 

Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same 
hundred years, all in the first rank of writers, if not of 
thinkers, represent much of the spirit of four successive 
generations. They are leading links in an intellectual 
chain. 

David Hume (1711-1776) remains the most salient 
type, in our island, of the scepticism, half conservative, 
half destructive, but never revolutionary, which marked 
the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some 
points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though, substi- 
tuting a staid temper and passionless logic for the incisive 
brilliancy of a mocking Mercury ; he had no relation, save 
an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. 

Robert Burns (1759-1796), last of great lyrists in- 
spired by a local genius, keenest of popular satirists, nar- 
rative poet of the people, spokesman of their higher as of 
their lower natures, stood on the verge between two eras. 
Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was also half 
Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed 
1 



2 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

the century ; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume 
himself. Master musician of his race, he was, as Thomas 
Campbell notes, severed, for good and ill, from his fellow- 
Scots by an utter want of their protecting or paralysing 
caution. 

Walter Scott (1771-1832), broadest and most gener- 
ous, if not loftiest of the group — " no sounder piece of 
British manhood," says Carlyle himself in his inadequate 
review, "was put together in that century" — the great 
revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with 
a magic glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was 
also, like Burns, the humorist of contemporary life. Deal- 
ing with Feudal themes, but in the manner of the Ro- 
mantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, the 
sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of 
Goetz von Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our 
bridge to Germany. 

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) is on the whole the 
strongest, though far from the finest spirit of the age suc- 
ceeding — an age of criticism threatening to crowd creation 
out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, some of 
which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now 
what Mill twenty -five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still 
true of Carlyle: "The reading public is apt to be divided 
between those to whom his views are everything and those 
to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to ex- 
tricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands 
of his thought and to measure his influence by indicating 
its range. 

Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in 
certain atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy 
figure — a giant image of themselves, thrown on the horizon 
by the dawn. Similar is the relation of Carlyle to the 



I.] INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 3 

common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite his per- 
fervid patriotism, was in many ways " a starry stranger." 
Carlyle was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every 
respect a macrocosm of the higher peasant class of the 
Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with the spirit of a dis- 
missed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could 
never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, 
frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of 
kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to ex- 
cess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if 
not self-seeldng, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean 
emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous — with 
one exception, that of Goethe — to his intellectual creditors; 
and, with reference to men and manners around him at 
variance with himself, violently intolerant. He bore a 
strange relation to the great poet, in many ways his pred- 
ecessor in influence, whom with persistent inconsistency 
he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot 
Lord Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the 
Latin races, the other was purely Teutonic : but the power 
of both was Titanic rather than Olympian ; both were 
forces of revolution ; both protested, in widely different 
fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge Indi- 
vidualism ; both were to a large extent egoists : the one 
whining, the other roaring against the "Philistine" re- 
straints of ordinary society. Both had hot hearts, big 
brains, and an exhaustless store of winged and fiery words ; 
both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made 
constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of 
Optimism ; Carlylism is the prose rather than " the male 
of Byronism." The contrasts are, however, obvious ; the 
author of Sartor tfesartus, however vaguely, defended the 
System of the Universe ; the author of Cain, with an 



4 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, 
arraigned it. In both we find vehemence and substantial 
honesty ; but, in the one, there is a dominant faith, tem- 
pered by pride, in the " caste of Vere de Vere," in Free- 
dom for itself — a faith marred by shifting purposes, the 
garrulous incontinence of vanity, and a broken life ; in the 
other unwavering belief in Law. The record of their fame 
is diverse. Byron leapt into the citadel, awoke and found 
himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient name. Car- 
lyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, 
only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained 
it. His career was a struggle, sterner than that of either 
Johnson or Wordsworth, from obscurity, almost from con- 
tempt, to a rarely challenged renown. Fifty years ago 
few " so poor as do him reverence :" at his death, in a 
sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deaf- 
ening was the Babel of the reviews; for the progress of 
every original thinker is accompanied by a stream of com- 
mentary that swells as it runs till it ends in a dismal 
swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from 
America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching 
came home to their hearts " late in the gloamin'." In 
Scotland, where, for good or ill, passions are in extremes, 
he was long howled down, lampooned, preached at, prayed 
for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a 
sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion ; 
and was, often by the very men who had tried and con- 
demned him for blasphemy, as senselessly credited with 
essential orthodoxy. " The stone which the builders re- 
jected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of 
the pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a 
dirge of rhapsodists whose measureless acclamations stifled 
the voice of sober criticism. In the realm of con tern- 



i.] INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 5 

porary English prose he has left no adequate successor ;' 
the throne that does not pass by primogeniture is vacant, 
and the bleak northern skies seem colder and grayer since 
that venerable head was laid to rest in the village church, 
far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose 
streets his figure was long familiar and his name was at 
last so honored. 

Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events 
he celebrates in his earliest History. In its opening pages, 
we are made to listen to the feet and chariots of "Du- 
barrydom " hurrying from the " Armida Palace," where 
Louis XV. and the ancien regime lay dying; later to the 
ticking of the cloeks in Launay's doomed Bastile ; again 
to the tocsin of the steeples that roused the singers of the 
Marseillaise to march from " their bright Phocaean city " 
and grapple with the Swiss guard, last Bulwark of the 
Bourbons. " The Swiss would have won," the historian 
characteristically quotes from Napoleon, " if they had had 
a commander." Already, over little more than the space 
of the author's life — for he was a contemporary of Keats, 
born seven months before the death of Burns, Shelley's 
junior by three, Scott's by four, Byron's by seven years — 
in the year when Goethe went to feel the pulse of the 
" cannon-fever" at Argonne — already these sounds are like 
sounds across a sea. Two whole generations have passed 
with the memory of half their storms. "Another race 
has been, and other palms are won." Old policies, govern- 
ments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been 
sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, 
Leipzig, Inkermann, Sadowa, Waterloo when he was 
twenty and Sedan when he was seventy -five, have been 

1 The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our time, 
Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude. 



6 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

fought and won. Born under the French Directory and 
the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two 
French empires, two kingdoms, and two republics; else- 
where partitions, abolitions, revivals and deaths of States 
innumerable. During his life our sway in the East 
doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Ital- 
ian without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Con- 
tinent, while another across the Atlantic developed to a 
magnitude that amazes and sometimes alarms the rest. 
Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated 
and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of 
the world's most restless, if not its wisest, age. In the 
internal affairs of the leading nations the transformation 
scenes were often as rapid as those of a pantomime. The 
Art and Literature of those eighty-six years — stirred to 
new thought and form at their commencement by the so- 
called Romantic movement, more recently influenced by 
the Classic reaction, the Pre-Raphaelite protest, the ^Es- 
thetic mode — followed various even contradictory stand- 
ards. But, in one line of progress, there was no shadow 
of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly 
down and Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, 
during the whole period, advanced without let and beyond 
the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams of the New At- 
lantis have not even in our days been wholly realised, 
Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the 
elements made ministers of Prospero's wand. This ap- 
parent, and partially real, conquest of matter has doubt- 
less done much to "relieve our estate," to make life in 
some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply re- 
sources to meet the demands of rapidly-increasing multi- 
tudes : but it is in danger of becoming a conquest of 
matter over us; for the agencies we have called into al- 



L ] INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 7 

most fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's mis- 
created goblin, to beat us down to the same level. San- 
guine spirits who 

"throw out acclamations of self -thanking, self-admiring, 
With, at every mile run faster, the wondrous, wondrous age," 

are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to 
dispel the darkness of the mind; that there are strict 
limits to the power of prosperity to supply man's wants 
or satisfy his aspirations. This is a great part of Carlyle's 
teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, accurately to 
define his religious, social, or political creed. He swallows 
formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus 
escapes analysis. No printed labels will stick to him : 
when we seek to corner him by argument he thunders and 
lightens. Emerson complains that he failed to extract 
from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by 
syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made 
the " Form " of Carlyle to confess itself. But call him 
what we will — essential Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, 
Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, practical Absolutist, or 
" the strayed reveller " of Radicalism — he is consistent in 
his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of 
the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists 
of our time was among his truest and most loyal friends ; 
they were bound together by the link of genius and 
kindred political views ; and Carlyle was himself an expert 
in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously 
subserves physical research: but of Physics themselves 
(astronomy being scarcely a physical science) his ignorance 
was profound, and his abusive criticisms of such men as 
Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or rather 
vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life 



8 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

with unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole uphol- 
sterers," he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes nonsensi- 
cal, vein, " and confectioners of modern Europe undertake 
to make one single shoeblack happy I" And more seriously 
of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been 
able to visit the battle-fields of Friedrich II.: 

Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admir- 
ing. . . . The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, 
are still infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged 
flight through immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of 
bright ? You unfortunate, you grin as an ape would at such a ques- 
tion : you do not know that unless you can reach thither in some 
effectual most veritable sense, you are lost, doomed to Hela's death- 
realm and the abyss where mere brutes are buried. I do not want 
cheaper cotton, swifter railways ; I want what Nbvalis calls " God, 
Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and sacrifices to 
Hudson help me towards that ? 

The economic and mechanical spirit of the age, faith 
is mere steel or stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The 
others were Insincerity in Politics and in Life, Democracy 
ithout Reverence, and Philanthropy without Sense. In 
our time these two last powers have made such strides as 
to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a 
ruler, who protests that one man is by nature as good as 
another, according to Carlyle is " shooting Niagara." In 
deference to the mandate of the philanthropist the last 
shred of brutality and much of decision has vanished from 
our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only 
tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel 
Romilly began his beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was 
at school, talkers of treason were liable to be disembowelled 
before execution ; now the crime of treason is practically 
erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called re- 



l] INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 9 

forms " within the range of practical politics." Individual- 
ism was still a mark of the early years of the century. 
The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" survived in Mirabeau, 
" never name to me that bete of a word * impossible ;'" 
in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, 
" I will break your empire like this vase ;" in Nelson 
turning his blind eye to the signal of retreat at Copen- 
hagen, and Wellington fencing Torres Vedras against the 
world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found, 
perhaps, its latest political representative in Prince Bis- 
marck. 

This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his 
undivided sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, 
Francia, Friedrich, to the men who have made manners, 
not to the manners which have made men, to the rulers 
of people, not to their representatives : and the not in- 
considerable following he has obtained is the most con- 
spicuous tribute to a power resolute to pull against the 
stream. How strong its currents may be illustrated by a 
few lines from our leading literary journal, the Atkenceum, 
of the Saturday after his death : 

" The future historian of the century will have to record 
the marvellous fact that while in the reign of Queen 
Victoria there was initiated, formulated, and methodised 
an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful and highly- 
gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a phi- 
losophy of history that would have better harmonised with 
the time of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched 
his sarcasms at human progress, there had been a convic- 
tion among thinkers that it was not the hero that de- 
veloped the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race 
that produced the hero ; that the wave produced the bub- 
ble, and not the bubble the wave. But the moment a 
1* 



10 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

theory of evolution saw the light it was a fact. The old 
cosmogony, on which were built Sartor Besartus and the 
Calvinism of Ecclefechan, was gone. Ecclefechan had de- 
clared that the earth did not move ; but it moved neverthe- 
less. The great stream of modern thought has advanced; 
the theory of evolution has been universally accepted; na- 
tions, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are 
denied the faculty of producing nations." 

Taliter, qualiter ; but one or two remarks on the in- 
cisive summary of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. 
First, the implied assertion — "Ecclefechan had declared 
that the earth did not move " — that Carlyle was in essen- 
tial sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted Galileo 
with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criti- 
cism extant : for what is his French Revolution but a can- 
nonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book 
has done, a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, 
a final storming of ol&4ortresses, an assertion of the ne- 
cessity of movement, progress, and upheaval. Secondly, 
every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shib- 
boleths, and one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were 
platitude to say that Mr. Darwin was not only an almost 
unrivalled student of nature, as careful and conscientious 
in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, but — 
pace Mr. Carlyle — a man of genius, who has thrown floods 
of light on the inter-relations of the organic world. But 
there are troops of serfs, "ullius addicti jurare in verba 
magistri," who, accepting, without attempt or capacity to 
verify the conclusions of the master mind, think to solve 
all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word 
" Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or 
of Shakespeare's divining rod, and you answer " Evolu- 
tion," 'tis as if, when sick in heart and sick in head, I were 



i.] INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY. 11 

referred, as medicine for " a mind diseased," to Grimm's 
Law or to the Magnetic Belt. 

Let us grant that Caesar was evolved from the currents 
in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius 
was a blend of Plato and Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft 
of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William I. a rill from 
Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame from 
the altar of the mediaeval church, Barbarossa a plant 
grown to masterdom in German woods, or later — not to 
heap up figures whose memories still possess the world — 
that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, Bacon a rechauffe of 
Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch dyke, 
Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, 
or Corsican Buonaparte the " armed soldier of Democracy." 
These men, at all events, were no bubbles on the froth of 
the waves which they defied and dominated. 

This, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistance 
that great men are creators as well as creatures of their 
age. Doubtless, as we advance in history, direct personal 
influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In an era of over- 
wrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, 
when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness 
and criticised to death, it remains a question whether, in 
the interests of the highest civilisation (which means op- 
portunity for every capable citizen to lead the highest 
life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to 
be accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of 
Democracy is a mere " matter of time." But time is in 
this case of the essence of the matter, and the party of 
resistance will all the more earnestly maintain that the 
defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have be- 
come civilised. "The individual withers and the world is 
more and more," preludes, though over a long interval, 



12 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. i. 

the cynic comment of the second " Locksley Hall " on the 
" increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier date "Lu- 
ria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majori- 
ties, 

A people is but the attempt of many 

To rise to the completer life of one ; 

And those who live as models to the mass 

Are singly of more value than they all. 

Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in 
his Hero Worship — in reality, in thought, and more in ac- 
tion, older than Buddha or than Achilles, but which he 
first, as a dogma, sprang on our recent times, clenched with 
the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau and Napoleon, 
mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of 
Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made is still graven 
on the minds of the men of light who lead, and cannot be 
wholly effaced by the tongues of the men of words who 
orate. If he leans unduly to the exaltation of personal 
power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be 
beneficent only if it be slow. Otherwise, to account for 
his attitude, we must refer to his life and to its surround- 
ings, i.e. to the circumstances amid which he was " evolved." 



CHAPTER II. 

ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 

[ 1795-1826. ] 

In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle Las 
warned us against giving too much weight to genealogy : 
but all his biographies, from the sketch of the Riquetti 
kindred to his full length Friedrich, prefaced by two vol- 
umes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, in- 
herited influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiog- 
raphy abound in suggestive reference. His family portraits 
are to be accepted with the deductions due to the family 
fever that was the earliest form of his hero-worship. Car- 
lyle, says the Athenaeum critic before quoted, divides con- 
temporary mankind into the fools and the wise : the wise 
are the Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward 
Irving; the fools all the rest of unfortunate mortals: a 
Fuseli stroke of the critic 1 rivalling any of the author crit- 
icised ; yet the comment has a grain of truth. 

The Carlyles are said to have come from the English town 
somewhat differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II., 
and, according to a legend, which the great author did not 
disdain to accept, among them was a certain Lord of Tor- 
thorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The 
churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the 

1 Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his imitators, 
their hands taking a dye from what they work in. 



U THOMAS GARLYLE. [chap. 

graves of the family, all with coats of arms — two griffins 
with adders' stings. More definitely we find Thomas, the 
author's grandfather, settled in that dullest of county vil- 
lages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel Highlanders 
on their southward march : he was notable for his study of 
Anson's Voyages and of the Arabian Nights: " a fiery man, 
his stroke as ready as his word; of the toughness and 
springiness of steel ; an honest but not an industrious 
man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, in which 
capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs 
with much effect; the family were subjected to severe pri- 
vations, the mother having, on occasion, to heat the meal 
into cakes by straw taken from the sacks on which the 
children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and 
throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons— 
" a curious sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one 
of them, " pithy, bitter speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." 
The second of the group, James, born 1757, married — first, 
a cousin, Janet Carlyle (the issue of which marriage, John 
of Cockermouth, died before his grandfather) ; second, 
Margaret Aitken, by whom he had four sons — Thomas, 
1795-1881; Alexander, 1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, 
translator of Dante), 1801-1879 ; and James, 1805-1890 ; 
also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of 
her cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of 
Mary, the niece who tended her famous uncle so faithfully 
during the last years of his life. Nowhere is Carlyle's 
loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in the first 
of the papers published under the name of Reminiscences. 
It differs from the others in being of an early date and 
free from all offence. From this pathetic sketch, written 
when on a visit to London in 1832 he had sudden news 
of his father's death, we may, even in our brief space, 



n .] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 15 

extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, 
i.e. the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his 
theme : 

In several respects I consider my father as one of the most inter- 
esting men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural 
endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you 
will ever forget that bold flowing style of his, flowing free from his 
untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a meta- 
phor was), with all manner of potent words. . . . Nothing did I ever 
hear him undertake to render visible which did not become almost 
ocularly so. Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger 
he had no need of oaths : his word3 were like sharp arrows that 
smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated 
(which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and for the sake 
chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even scrupulous 
veracity. ... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem of 
the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while 
his son stands here on the verge of the new. ... A virtue he had 
which I should learn to imitate : he never spoke of what was dis- 
agreeable and past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most 
open contempt for all "clatter." ... He was irascible, choleric, and 
we all dreaded his wrath, but passion never mastered him. . . . 
Man's face he did not fear : God he always feared. His reverence 
was, I think, considerably mixed with fear— rather awe, as of utter- 
able depths of silence through which flickered a trembling hope. . . . 
Let me learn of him. Let me write my books as he built his houses, 
and walk as blamelessly through this shadow world. . . . Though 
genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was nevertheless but 
half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not freely 
love him. His heart seemed as if walled in : he had not the free 
means to unbosom himself. ... It seemed as if an atmosphere of 
fear repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late 
years I was ever more or less awed and chilled by him. 

James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. 
The failings of both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. 
Thev were at one in their integrity, independence, fighting 



16 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

force at stress, and their command of winged words ; but 
the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a broader 
spirit ; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he 
was a better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a 
grimmer Calvinist. " Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, " is 
doing very well, and has given us no more paraphrases." 
He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under the 
narrowing influences of the Covenanting land ; but he re- 
mained stable and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built 
with his own hands. James Carlyle hammered on at 
Ecclefechan, making in his best year £100, till, after the 
first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, 
a bleak farm two miles from Lockerby, where he so throve 
by work and thrift that he left, on his death in 1832, about 
£1000. Strong, rough, and eminently straight, intolerant 
of contradiction and ready with words like blows, his un- 
sympathetic side recalls rather the father of the Brontes on 
the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle 
of Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological 
theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more 
moan over the aberrations of her favourite son. Like most 
Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her heart on seeing 
him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a 
fall ; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having 
only late in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his 
books. Over these they talked, smoking together, in old 
country fashion, by the hearth ; and she was to the last 
proud of the genius which grew in large measure under 
the unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. 

Book II. of Sartor is an acknowledged fragment of 
autobiography, mainly a record of the author's inner life, 
but with numerous references to his environment. There 
is not much to identify the foster parents of Teufelsdrockh, 



il] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 11 

and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the 
place of ancestry : Entefuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, 
where the ducks are paddling in the ditch that has to 
pass muster for a stream, to-day as a century gone : the 
severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth and 
Carlyle himself) survived the need for it is clearly recalled; 
also the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, " In 
an orderly house, where the litter of children's sports is 
hateful, your training is rather to bear than to do. I was 
forbid much, wishes 4n any measure bold I had to re- 
nounce ; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly 
held me down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a whole- 
some one." The following oft-quoted passage is characteris- 
tic of his early love of nature and the humorous touches by 
which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment : 

On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread 
crumb boiled in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the 
wall, which I could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed : 
there many a sunset have I, looking at the distant mountains, con- 
sumed, not without relish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold 
and azure, that hush of worldly expectation as day died, were still a 
Hebrew speech for me : nevertheless I was looking at the fair il- 
lumined letters, and had an eye for the gilding. 

In all that relates to the writer's own education, the 
Dichtung of Sartor and the Wahrheit of the Reminis- 
cences are in accord. By Carlyle's own account, an "in- 
significant portion " of it " depended on schools." Like 
Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, 
where home influences counted for more than the teaching 
of not very competent masters. He soon read eagerly and 
variously. At the age of seven he was, by an Inspector 
of the old order, reported to be "complete in English." 



18 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar 
School of Annan, the " Hintersehlag Gymnasium," where 
his " evil days began." (Every oversensitive child finds 
the life of a public school one long misery.! Ordinary 
boys — those of the Scotch borderland being of the most 
savage type — are more brutal than ordinary men; they 
hate singularity as the world at first hates originality, and 
have none of the restraints which the later semi-civilisa- 
tion of life imposes. " They obey the impulse of rude 
Nature which bids the deerherd fall upon any stricken 
hart, the duck flock put to death any broken - winged 
brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise 
over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for his 
moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and 
called " Tom the Tearful " because of his habit of crying. 
To add much to his discomfort, he had made a rash prom- 
ise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to her 
husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles 
— a promise to abstain from fighting, provocative of many 
cuffs till it was well broken by a hintersehlag, applied to 
some blustering bully. Nor had he refuge in the sym- 
pathy of his teacher's " hide-bound pedants, who knew 
Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much : that 
it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on 
through the muscular integument by appliance of birch 
rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge 
of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek 
alphabet, began to study history, and had his first glimpse 
of Edward Irving, the bright prize-taker from Edinburgh, 
later his Mentor and then life-long friend. On Thomas's 
return home it was decided to send him to the University, 
despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, 
" Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant 



il] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 19 

parents." "Thou hast not done so," said old James in 
after years; "God be thanked for it," and the son plays 
due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial gener- 
osity of the father : " With a noble faith he launched me 
forth into a world which he himself had never been per- 
mitted to visit." Carlyle walked through Moffat all the 
way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail (who 
owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes 
open to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two 
passages of the Reminiscences. The boys, as is the fashion 
still, clubbed together in cheap lodgings, and Carlyle at- 
tended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. Comparatively 
little is known of his college life, which seems to have 
been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is 
now, a compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, re- 
laxation, or society outside Class Rooms, and within them 
a constant tug at Science, mental or physical, at the gate- 
wav to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from hints 
in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived 
much with his own fancies, and owed little to any system. 
He is clearly thinking of his own youth in his account of 
Dr. Francia: "Jose must have been a loose-made tawny 
creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably to 
crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature — subject 
to the terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in 
Sartor, " It is my painful duty to say that out of England 
and Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered 
Universities," is the first of a loug series of libels on 
things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital 
was still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in 
the light of the circle of Scott, which followed that of 
Burns, in the early fame of Cockburn and Clark (Lord 
Eldin), of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews, and of 



20 THOMAS CARLYEE. [chap. 

the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were con- 
spicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability 
required from Professors, some of them — conspicuously 
Brown, the more original if less " sound " successor of 
Dugald Stewart, Play fair, and Leslie — rising to a higher 
rank. But great Educational institutions must adapt 
themselves to the training of average minds by require- 
ments and retractions against which genius always rebels. 
Biography more than History repeats itself, and the mur- 
murs of Carlyle are, like those of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, 
and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of irrepressible 
individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in 
any sense a classic ; read Greek with difficulty — ^Eschylus 
and Sophocles mainly in translations — and while appre- 
ciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. For Scotch Meta- 
physics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his 
days there was written over the Academic entrances " No 
Mysticism." He distinguished himself in Mathematics, 
and soon found, by his own vaunt, 1 the Principia of 
Newton prostrate at his feet : he was a favourite pupil of 
Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending 
him, but he took no prizes : the noise in the class room 
hindered his answers, and he said later to Mr. Froude that 
thoughts only came to him properly when alone. The 
social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, 
by choice and necessity integer vitce he divided hi-s time be- 
tween the seclusion of study and writing letters, in which 
kind of literature he was perhaps the most prolific writer 
of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course with- 
out taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the 

1 He went so far as to say in 1847 that " the man who had 
mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to 
God than he had done before." 



«.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 21 

same year, accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at 
Annan as successor to Irving, who had been translated to 
Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the ministry, 
though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up 
twice a year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one 
of which, " on the uses of affliction," was afterwards by 
himself condemned as flowery ; another was a Latin thesis 
on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The post- 
humous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the 
fragment of the novel Wotton Reinfred, reconciles us to 
the loss of those which have not been recovered. 

In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study 
German, and corresponded with his College friends. Many 
of Carlyle's early letters, reproduced in the volumes edited 
by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in what Sydney 
Smith asserts to be the only unpermissible style, " the 
tiresome ;" and the thought, far from being precocious, is 
distinctly commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell 
on the fall of Napoleon ; or the following to his parents : 
" There are few things in this world more valuable than 
knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it;" or 
to James Johnstone the trite quotation, " Truly pale death 
overturns with impartial foot the hut of the poor man and 
the palace of the king." Several are marred by the ego- 
tism which in most Scotch peasants of aspiring talent 
takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves with 
others ; refrains of the ambition against which the writer 
elsewhere inveighs as the " kettle tied to the dog's tail." 
In a note to Thomas Murray he writes : 

Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being 
known has been the foremost. Fortune ! bestow coronets and 
crowns and principalities and purses and pudding and power, upon 
the great and noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with 



22 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

a heart unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I 
may attain to literary fame. 

That his critical and literary instincts were yet unde- 
veloped there is ample proof. Take his comment, at the 
age of nineteen, on the verses of Leyden : 

Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, 

For that was a day 

When we stood in our array 

Like the lions might at bay. 

" Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with 
Mitchell consumes a whole volume) he writes: "Read 
Shakespeare. If you have not, then I desire you read it 
(sic) and tell me what you think of him" etc. Elsewhere 
the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the 
lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been pre- 
viously travestied in the more stilted passages of the letters 
of Burns. " Many of his opinions are not to be adopted. 
How odd does it look to refer all the modifications of 
national character to the influence of moral causes. Might 
it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those 
which he denominates moral causes originate from phys- 
ical circumstances." The whole first volume of this some- 
what over-expanded collection overflows with ebullitions of 
bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of Byron's 
early romances seems philanthropy, e.g. : 

How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seems to me all the uses 
of this world. For what are its inhabitants ? Its great men and its 
little, its fat ones and its lean . . . pitiful automatons, despicable 
Yahoos, yea, they are altogether an insufferable thing. " 0! for a 
lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless continuity of shade, 
where the scowl of the purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of 
the coxcomb, the bray of the ninny and the clodpole might never 
reach me more." 



il] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 23 

On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the 
imperial intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splen- 
did independence of the writer. In his twenty-first year 
Carlyle again succeeded his Annan predecessor (who seems 
to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of severity) 
as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. 
The Reminiscences of Irving's generous reception of his 
protege present one of the pleasantest pictures in the rec- 
ords of their friendship. The same chapter is illustrated 
by a series of sketches of the scenery of the east coast 
rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere en- 
livened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the 
cynical criticisms of character that make most readers re- 
joice in having escaped the author's observation. 

During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Car- 
lyle encountered his first romance, in making acquaintance 
with a well-born young lady, "by far the brightest and 
cleverest" of Irving's pupils — Margaret Gordon — "an ac- 
quaintance which might easily have been more " had not 
relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. 
Froude is right in asserting this lady to have been the 
original of Sartor's "Blumine," and in leaving him to 
marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately Governor of Nova 
Scotia, she bequeathed, though in formal antitheses, advice 
that reflects well on her discrimination of character. " Cul- 
tivate the milder dispositions of the heart, subdue the 
mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius will render 
you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the 
awful distance between you and other men by kind and 
gentle manners. Deal gently with their inferiority, and be 
convinced that they will respect you as much and like you 
more." To this advice, which he never even tried to take, 
she adds, happily perhaps for herself, " I give you not my 



24 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 
Carlyle, always intolerant of work imposed, came to the 
conclusion that " it were better to perish than to continue 
schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with £90 saved, for 
Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private 
pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the 
gates of literature — gates constantly barred, for even in 
those older days of laxer competition, obstinacy, and outre- 
ness, unredeemed by any social advantages, were guaran- 
tees of frequent failure. Men with the literary form of 
genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of 
defeat. Carlyle, even in his best moods, resented real or 
fancied injuries, and at this stage of his career complained 
that he got nothing but vinegar from his fellows, compar- 
ing himself to a worm that, trodden on, would turn into a 
torpedo. He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, 
which "gnawed like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his 
stomach, and by sleeplessness, due in part to internal 
causes, but also to the " Bedlam " noises of men, machines, 
and animals, which pestered him in town and country from 
first to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried 
law, mathematical teaching, contributions to magazines and 
dictionaries, everything but journalism, to which he had a 
rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he had defi- 
nitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may 
have been due to his reading of Gibbon, 1 Rousseau, Vol- 
taire, etc., how far to self-reflection is uncertain, but he 
already found himself unable, in a plain sense, to subscribe 
to the Westminster Confession or any so-called orthodox 

} He refers to Gibbon's Decline and Fall as " of all books the most 
impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of 
mind. His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively trans- 
piercing, were often admirably potent and illustrative to me." 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 25 

articles, and equally unable by any philosophical reconcili- 
ation of contraries to write black with white on a ground 
of neutral gray. Mentally and physically adrift he was 
midway in the valley of the shadow, which he represents 
as " The Everlasting No," and beset by " temptations in 
the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, " the biographies 
of men of letters are the wretchedest chapters in our his- 
tory, except perhaps the Newgate Calendar," a remark that 
recalls the similar cry of Burns, " There are not among the 
martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the 
poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with con- 
stant bitterness to the absence of a popularity which he 
yet professes to scorn. 

I was entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles ; solitary eating my 
own heart, misgivings as to whether there shall be presently any- 
thing else to eat, fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles 
and miseries . . . three weeks without any kind of sleep, from im- 
possibility to be free of noise, . . . wanderings through mazes of 
doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, etc. 

What is this but Byron's cry, " I am not happy ?" which 
his afterwards stern critic compares to the screaming of a 
meat-jack. 

Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same 
dismal mood. " Mainhill," says his biographer, " was never 
a less happy home to him than it was this summer (1819). 
He could not conceal the condition of his mind ; and to 
his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more 
a matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, 
he must have seemed as if possessed." 

Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a 
time wrote hopefully about his studies. " The law I find 
to be a most complicated subject, yet I like it pretty well. 
2 



26 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean compliances 
are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon 
gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record 
of his throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured 
notes. 

I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, 
and converse with and question various dull people of the practical 
sort. But it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself ap- 
peared to me mere denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing tow- 
ards nothing but money as wages for all that bogpost of disgust. 

The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radi- 
cal rising in Glasgow against the poverty which was the 
natural aftermath of the great war, oppressions, half real, 
half imaginary, of the military force, and the yeomanry in 
particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences of 
the time is doubly interesting because written (in the ar- 
ticle on Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long 
ceased to be a Radical. A few sentences suffice to illus- 
trate this phase or stage of his political progress : 

A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very 
fierce Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated 
by it all around me . . . gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror 
and fury, and looking disgustingly busy and important. . . . One 
bleared Sunday morning I had gone out for my walk. At the riding 
house in Nicholson Street was a kind of straggly group, with red- 
coats interspersed. They took their way, not very dangerous-looking 
men of war ; but there rose from the little crowd the strangest 
shout I have heard human throats utter, not very loud, but it said as 
plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of sincerity, " May 
the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and dead to the 
distresses of your fellow-creatures." Another morning ... I met an 
advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in hand, 
towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen " 



il] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 27 

volunteers now a-foot. " You should have the like of this," said he, 
cheerily patting his musket. " Hm, yes ; but I haven't yet quite set- 
tled on which side " — which probably he hoped was quiz, though it 
really expressed my feeling . . . mutiny and revolt being a light mat- 
ter to the young. 

This period is illustrated by numerous letters from 
Irving, who had migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to 
Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound counsels to persevere 
in some profession and make the best of practical oppor- 
tunities. None of Carlyle's answers have been preserved, 
but the sole trace of his having been influenced by his 
friend's advice is his contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen 1 

1 The subjects of these were — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mon- 
taigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Neck- 
er, Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, 
Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These 
articles, on the whole, judiciously omitted from the author's collected 
works, are characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace 
and general fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the 
less impressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous 
passages, are curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of 
the writer's early judgments : " The brilliant hints which ' Montes- 
quieu' scatters round him with a liberal hand have excited or as- 
sisted the speculations of others in almost every department of po- 
litical economy, and he is deservedly mentioned as a principal founder 
of that important service." " Mirabeau confronted him (' Necker ') 
like his evil genius ; and being totally without scruple in the employ- 
ment of any expedient, was but too successful in overthrowing all 
reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that state of an- 
archy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. 
Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Mon- 
tagu, etc., are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of con- 
scientious research, fed on the " Lives of the Poets " and Trafalgar 
memories. The morality, as in the Essay on Montaigne, is unex- 
ceptionable ; the following would commend itself to any boarding- 



28 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

articles to the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia under the editor- 
ship of Sir David Brewster. The scant remuneration ob- 
tained from these was well timed, but they contain no 
original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile 
it appears from one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's 
thoughts had been, as later in his early London life, turn- 
ing towards emigration. " Pie says," writes his friend, " I 
have the ends of my thoughts to bring together . . . my 
views of life to reform, my health to recover, aud then 
once more I shall venture my bark on the waters of this 
wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall steer west 
and try the waters of another world." 

The resolves, sometimes the efforts of celebrated Eng- 
lishmen, " nos manet oceanus," as Cromwell, Burns, Cole- 
ridge, and Southey (allured, some critic suggests, by the 
poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, Richard 
Hengist Home, and Browning's " Waring," 1 to elude " the 
fever and the fret " of an old civilisation, and take refuge 
in the fancied freedom of wild lands, when more than 
dreams have been failures. Puritan patriots, it is true, 
made New England and the scions of the Cavaliers Vir- 
ginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been 
successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of 
Heinrich Heine. It is certain that, despite his first warm 
recognition coming from across the Atlantic, the author of 
the Latter-Day Pamphlets would have found the " States " 

school : " Melancholy experience has never ceased to show that great 
warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be united with a 
coarse and ignoble heart." 

1 Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his 
New York Press and " plant him where the red deer feed, in the 
green forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's 
banished Duke. 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 29 

more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or 
London. 

The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit 
to Irving, on Carlyle's way to spend, as was his wont, the 
summer months at home. His few days in Glasgow are 
recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed merchants 
at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. 
Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and 
a respect but slightly modified. The critic's praise of 
British contemporaries, other than relatives, is so rare that 
the following sentences are worth transcribing : 

He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, 
honesty, and kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagina- 
tion. ... He had a burst of genuine fun too. . . . His laugh was ever 
a hearty, low guffaw, and his tones in preaching would reach to the 
piercingly pathetic. No preacher ever went so into one's heart. He 
was a man essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. 
Such an intellect, professing to be educated, and yet . . . ignorant in 
all that lies beyond the horizon in place or time I have almost no- 
where met with — a man capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy 
brooding ... as a first stage of his life well indicated, . . . yet capa- 
ble of impetuous activity and braying audacity, as his later years 
showed. I suppose there will never again be such a preacher in any 
Christian church. "The truth of Christianity," he said, "was all 
written in us already in sympathetic ink. Bible awakens it and you 
can read." 

A sympathetic image but of no great weight as an argu- 
ment addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose 
originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in 
his, mainly commonplace, thought, had the credit of rec- 
ognising the religious side of his (Carlyle's) genius, when 
to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of offence. 
One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer 



30 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

is notably just : " He is a lover of earnestness more than a 
lover of truth." 

There follows in some of the first pages of the Reminis- 
cences an account of a long walk with Irving, who had ar- 
ranged to accompany Carlyle for the first stage, i.e. fifteen 
miles of the road of his, for the most part, pedestrian 
march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among many 
of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the 
beached margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a 
pen almost as magical as Turner's brush. We must refer 
to the pages of Mr. Froude for the picture of Drumclog 
moss — " a good place for Cameronian preaching, and dan- 
gerously difficult for Claverse (sic) and horse soldiery if 
the suffering remnant had a few old muskets among 
them " — for the graphic glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the 
talk by the dry stone fence, in the twilight. " It was just 
here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from me by de- 
grees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of 
the Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to ex- 
pect I ever could or should. This, if this was so, he had 
pre-engaged to take well of me, like an elder brother, if I 
would be frank with him. And right loyally he did so." 
They parted here : Carlyle trudged on to the then " utter- 
ly quiet little inn " at Muirkirk, left next morning at 
4 a.m., and reached Dumfries, a distance of fifty -four 
miles, at 8 p.m., "the longest walk I ever made." He 
spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern languages, 
"living riotously with Schiller and Goethe," at work on 
the Encyclopaedia articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, 
when there came an offer of the charge of a son of a York- 
shire farmer, which Irving urged him to accept, advancing 
the old plea, " You live too much in an ideal world," and 
wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illit- 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 31 

erate men of middle life. You may be taught to forget 
... the splendours and envies ... of men of literature." 

This exhortation led to a result recorded with much 
humour, egotism, and arrogance in a letter to his intimate 
friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso Grammar School, 
■which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was 
yet published, several years after the death of the recipi- 
ent and shortly after that of the writer, in a gossiping 
memoir. We are, therefore, at liberty to select from the 
letter the following paragraphs : 

I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power to 
communicate what seemed then likely to produce a considerable 
change in my stile (sic) of life, a proposal to become a " travelling 
tutor," as they call it, to a young person in the North Riding, for 
whom that exercise was recommended on account of bodily and 
mental weakness. They offered me £150 per annum, and withal in- 
vited me to come and examine things on the spot before engaging. 
I went accordingly, and happy was it I went ; from description I 
was ready to accept the place ; from inspection all Earndale would 
not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, a semi-vege- 
table, the elder brother, head of the family, a two - legged animal 
without feathers, intellect, or virtue, and all the connections seemed 
to have the power of eating pudding but no higher power. So I left 
the barbarous people. . . . York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan 
Dryasdust (see Ivanhoe) is justly named. York is the Bceotia of 
Britain. . . . Upon the whole, however, I derived great amusement 
from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of men, from 
graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with them all, and broke 
specimens from their souls (if any,) which I retain within the muse- 
um of my cranium. I have no prospects that are worth the name. 
I am like a being thrown from another planet on this dark terres- 
trial ball, an alien, a pilgrim . . . and life is to me like a pathless, a 
waste, and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if you 
can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a fearful thing to 
be swept in by the roaring surge of life, and then to float alone un- 
directed on its restless, monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet 



32 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

you may, or if you must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the 
waves without a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cork boats, 
yet hold fast by the Manilla ship, and do not let go the painter. 

Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his 
friend's despondency, sent him a most generous and deli- 
cately-worded invitation to spend some months under his 
roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter of March, 1821, 
he writes to his brother John : " Edinburgh, with all its 
drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows 
one of his finest descriptions, that of the view from Arthur's 
Seat. 

According to the most probable chronology, for many 
of Carlyle's dates are hard to fix, the next important event 
of his life, his being introduced, on occasion of a visit to 
Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by her old tutor, Edward 
Irving — an event which marks the beginning of a new era 
in his career — took place towards the close of May or in 
the first week of June. To June is assigned the incident, 
described in Sartor as the transition from the Everlasting 
No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of revelation that came 
upon him as he was in Leith Walk — Rue St. Thomas de 
l'Enfer in the Romance — on the way to cool his distem- 
pers by a plunge in the sea. The passage proclaiming 
this has been everywhere quoted ; and it is only essential 
to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. Paul 
and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual 
impulse. It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in 
person or creed, it was but the assertion of a strong man- 
hood against an almost suicidal mood of despair ; a con- 
dition set forth with a superabundant paraphernalia of 
eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teu- 
felsdrockh had darkened into disbelief in divine or human 
justice, freedom, or himself. If there be a God, He sits 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 33 

on the hills " since the first Sabbath," careless of mankind. 
Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire and 
fear ;" virtue " some bubble of the blood," absence of vi- 
tality perhaps. 

What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the 
liver ? Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold. 
. . . Thus has the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question 
after question into the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. 

From this scepticism, deeper than that of Queen Mab, 
fiercer than that of Candide, Carlyle was dramatically res- 
cued by the sense that he was a servant of God, even when 
doubting His existence. 

After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, I never- 
theless still loved truth, and would bait no jot of my allegiance. . ... . 

Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me for following her ; no 
falsehood ! though a whole celestial lubberland were the price of 
apostacy. 

With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough 
of despond and asserts himself : 

Ich bin ein Mensch geboren 
Und das muss ein Kampfer seyn. 

He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present 
strength, and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he 
lived to achieve. 

He would not make his judgment blind; 
He faced the spectres of the mind — 

but he never " laid them," or came near the serenity of his 
master, Goethe ; and his teaching, public and private, re- 
mained half a wail. The Leith Walk revolt was rather 
the attitude of a man turning at bay than of one making 
a leap. 

2* 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Death ? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will meet it and 
defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream of fire over my 
soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from that time the temper 
of my misery was changed ; not . . . whining sorrow . . . but grim 
defiance. 

Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him 
writing : 

I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times 
as fierce, upon myself and all things earthly. . . . The year is closing. 
This time eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago. . . . 

Oh! little did my mother think, 

That day she cradled me, 
The lands that I should travel in, 

The death I was to dee. 

My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be 
immured in a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into 
an inlet of pain. How have I deserved this ? . . . I know not. Then 
why don't you kill yourself, sir ? Is there not arsenic, is there not 
ratsbane of various kinds, and hemp, and steel? Most true, Satha- 
nas . . . but it will be time enough to use them when I have lost the 
game I am but losing, . . . and while my friends, my mother, father, 
brothers, sisters live, the duty of not breaking their hearts would 
still remain. ... I want health, health, health ! On this subject I 
am becoming quite furious : my torments are greater than I am able 
to bear. 

Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is 
there any excess of Optimism ; but after the Leith Walk 
inspiration he had resolved on " no surrender ;" and that, 
henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have proof 
in its more regular, if not more rapid, progress. His last 
hack service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless 
we add a translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's 
Geometry, begun, according to some reports, in the Kirk- 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 35 

caldy period, finished in 1822, and published in 1824. 
For this task, prefixed by an original Essay on Proportion, 
much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respect- 
able sum of £50. Two subsequent candidatures for 
Chairs of Astronomy showed that Carlyle had not lost his 
taste for Mathematics; but this work was his practical 
farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an 
author were those of an interpreter. His complete mas- 
tery of German has been said to have endowed him with 
" his sword of sharpness and shoes of swiftness ;" it may 
be added, in some instances also, with the " fog-cap." But 
in his earliest substantial volume, the Life of Schiller, 
there is nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. 
This work began to appear in the London Magazine in 
1823, was finished in 1824, and in 1825 published in a 
separate form. Approved during its progress by an en- 
couraging article in the Times, it was, in 1830, translated 
into German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced 
the work by an important commendatory preface, and so 
first brought the author's name conspicuously before a 
continental public. Carlyle himself, partly, perhaps, from 
the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak slighting- 
ly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography : " It is," 
said he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, 
meagre, bombastic." But these are sentences of a morbid 
time, when, for want of other victims, he turned and rent 
himself. Pari passu, he was toiling at his translation of 
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. This was published in 
Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in Blackwood, 
it was generally recognised as one of the best English ren- 
derings of any foreign author ; and Jeffrey, in his absurd 
review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks in high terms 
of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent at- 



36 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

tack of De Quincey — a writer as unreliable as brilliant — in 
the London Magazine does not seem to have carried much 
weight even then, and has none now. The Wanderjahre, 
constituting the third volume of the English edition, first 
appeared as the last of four on German Romance — a series 
of admirably selected and executed translations from Mu- 
sseus, Fouque, Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, pref- 
aced by short biographical and critical notices of each — 
published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is also that 
of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms 
which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, 
established Carlyle as the English pioneer of German liter- 
ature. The result of these works would have been enough 
to drive the wolf from the door and to render their author 
independent of the oatmeal from home ; but another 
source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, 
but to settle his brother Alick in a farm, and to support 
John through his University course as a medical student. 
This and similar services to the family circle were rendered 
with gracious disclaimers of obligation. " What any 
brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a com- 
mon stock from which all are entitled to draw." 

For this good fortune he was again indebted to his 
friend of friends. Irving had begun to feel his position 
at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and at the close of 1821 he was 
induced to accept an appointment to the Caledonian Chap- 
el at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make 
a greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and final- 
ly, be lost in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow 
him, saying, " Scotland breeds men, but England rears 
them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. Strachey, one 
of his worshipping audience, to her sister, Mrs. Buller, he 
found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. 



il] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 37 

Charles, the elder, was a youth of bright but restive intel- 
ligence, and it was desired to find some transitional train- 
ing for him on his way from Harrow to Cambridge. Ir- 
ving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's 
charge. The proposal, with an offer of £200 a year, was 
accepted, and the brothers were soon duly installed in 
George Square, while their tutor remained in Moray Place, 
Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship were 
eminently satisfactory ; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of 
the Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task ; they seemed 
to him " quite another set of boys than I have been used 
to, and treat me in another sort of manner than tutors are 
used. The eldest is one of the cleverest boys I have ever 
seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and 
the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the fa- 
vourite pupil, whose brilliant University and Parliamentary 
career bore testimony to the good practical guidance he 
had received. His premature death at the entrance on a 
sphere 1 of wider influence made a serious blank in his old 
master's life. 

But as regards the relation of the employer and em- 
ployed, we are wearied by the constantly recurring record 
of kindness lavishly bestowed, ungraciously received, and 
soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder Bullers — the 
mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, 
the father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from 
the Anglo-Indian service — came to Edinburgh in the spring 
of the tutorship, and recognising Carlyle's abilities, wel- 
comed him to the family circle, and treated him, by his own 
confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did not de- 

1 Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. He 
died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (cet. forty-two). 



88 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

serve ;" adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to 
his hours and habits ; consulting his convenience and hu- 
mouring his whims. Early in 1823 they went to live to- 
gether at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, when he contin- 
ued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons ; 
but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical ref- 
erences to their aristocratic friends and querulous com- 
plaints of the servants. During the winter, for greater 
quiet, a room was assigned to him in another house near 
Kinnaird ; a consideration which met with the award : 
"My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admit- 
tance to no wind that blows." And about this same time he 
wrote, growling at his fare : " It is clear to me that I shall 
never recover my health under the economy of Mrs. Buller." 
In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle fol- 
lowed in June by a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival 
he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, sneering at his fellow pas- 
sengers, but ending with a striking picture of his first im- 
pressions of the capital : 

We were winding slowly through the forests of masts in the 
Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, the 
coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten thousand 
times ten thousand sounds and movements of that monstrous harbour 
formed the grandest object I had ever witnessed. One man seems a 
drop in the ocean; you feel annihilated in the immensity of that 
heart of all the world. 

On reaching London he first stayed for two or three 
weeks under Irving's roof and was introduced to his 
friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young cousin Kitty, 
who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, 
he always spoke well : but the Basil Montagues, to whose 
hospitality and friendship he was made welcome, he has 
maligned in such a manner as to justify the retaliatory 



ii.] ECCLEFEOHAN AND EDINBURGH. 39 

pamphlet of the sharp - tongued eldest daughter of the 
house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By let- 
ter and " reminiscence " he is equally reckless in invective 
against almost all the eminent men of letters with whom 
he then came in contact, and also, in most cases, in ridicule 
of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and 
Coleridge have just enough truth to exasperate the libels, 
in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their 
being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his 
frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kind- 
ness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Set- 
tled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he 
writes : " The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. 
They live in the midst of fashion and external show. They 
love no living creature." And a fortnight later, from Ir- 
ving's house at Pentonville, he sends to his mother an ac- 
count of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him 
two alternatives— to go with the family to France or to re- 
main in the country preparing the eldest boy for Cam- 
bridge. He declined both, and they parted, shaking hands 
with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a sentence that 
recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, 1 " that I have done 
with them. ... I was selling the very quintessence of my 
spirit for £200 a year." 

There followed eight weeks of residence in or about 
Birmingham, with a friend called Badams, who undertook 
to cure dyspepsia by a new method and failed without be- 
ing reviled. Together, and in company with others, as 
the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the 
toiling squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from 
radical democracy to Platonic autocracy, continued to take 

* Vide Carlyle's Life of Sterling, chap, viii., p. *79. 



40 THOMAS CAKLYLE. [chap. 

a deep interest; on other days they had pleasant excur- 
sions to the green fields and old towers of Warwickshire. 
On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De Quin- 
cey's review of Meister, and in recounting the event cred- 
its himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is 
perhaps right on some points; if so let him be admon- 
itory." But the description that follows of " the child 
that has been in hell," however just, is less magnanimous. 
Then came a trip, in company with Mr. Strachey and Kit- 
ty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to 
Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis 
XVIII. was then lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments 
are mainly acid remarks on the Palais Royal, with the re- 
frain, " God bless the narrow seas." But he saw Legendre 
and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and Talma act, and what 
was of more moment, had his first sight of the Continent 
and the city of one phase of whose history he was to be 
the most brilliant recorder. Back in London for the win- 
ter, where his time was divided between Irving's house 
and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street; 
he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the 
translation of Meister, and wrote more epistolary satires, 
welcome at Haddington. 

In March, 1825, Carlyle again set his face northward, and 
travelling by coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bol- 
ton, and Carlisle, established himself, in May, at Hoddam 
Hill ; a farm near the Solway, three miles from Mainhill, 
which his father had leased for him. His brother Alex- 
ander farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German transla- 
tions and rode about on horseback. For a space, one of 
the few contented periods of his life, there is a truce to 
complaining. Here, free from the noises, which are the 
pests of literary life, he was building up his character and 



ii.] ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH. 41 

forming the opinions which, with few material changes, he 
lono- continued to hold. Thus he writes from over a dis- 
tance of forty years : 

With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam Hill 
has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now like a not ignoble 
russet-coated idyll in my memory ; one of the quietest on the whole, 
and perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life. ... I found 
that I had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fear- 
ful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of 
my epoch, and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of 
ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory. . . . Once more, 
thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and still feel endless- 
ly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I per- 
ceived, had travelled the steep road before me, the first of the mod- 
erns. Bodily health itself seemed improving. . . . Nowhere can I 
recollect of myself such pious musings, communings silent and 
spontaneous with Fact and Nature as in these poor Annandale local- 
ities. The sound of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday morn- 
ings from Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, 
was strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen hun- 
dred years. 

Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in 
a life of lurid storms, we have the expression of his pas- 
sionate independence, his tyrannous love of liberty : 

It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of con- 
sciousness — of inward dignity — I have gained since I came within 
the walls of this poor cottage— my own four walls. They simply 
admit that I am Herr im Hause, and act on this conviction. There 
is no grumbling about my habitudes and whims. If I choose to dine 
on fire and brimstone, they will cook it for me to their best skill, 
thinking only that I am an unintelligible mortal, fdcheux to deal 
with, but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. 

The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the 
most characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the 



42 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. ii. 

writer, the actual composition of which seems, however, to 
belong to the next chapter of his career, beginning : 

The storm and night is on the waste, 

Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, 

As fast on willing nag I haste 
Home to my own four walls. 

The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance : 

King George has palaces of pride, 

And armed grooms must ward those halls; 

With one stout bolt I safe abide 
Within my own four walls. 

Not all his men may sever this ; 

It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls ; 
My whinstone house my castle is — 

I have my own four walls. 

When fools or knaves do make a rout, 
With jigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, 

I turn my back and shut them out: 
These are my own four walls. 



CHAPTER III. 

CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 
[1826-1834.] 

" Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin', light-heartit 
thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she 
grew grave a' at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had 
been her teacher ; and he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister 

, Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel', and he cam' to finish 

her off like." — Haddington Nurse. 

" My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at 
a furlong's distance."— T. Carlyle, from Craigenputtock, Oct., 1830. 

During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the 
verge of a crisis of his career, i.e. his making a marriage, 
for the chequered fortune of which he was greatly himself 

to blame. 

No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a 
domestic life, already made familiar in so many records 
that they are past evasion. Various opinions have been 
held regarding the lady whom he selected to share his lot. 
Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs 
to an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. 
Ireland in her judicious and interesting abridgment of the 
material amply supplied. Jane Baillie Welsh (b. 1801, 
d. 1866)— descended on the paternal side from Elizabeth, 
the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal 
owning to an inheritance of gipsy blood—belonged to a 



44 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

family long esteemed in the borders. Her father, a distin- 
guished Edinburgh student, and afterwards eminent surgeon 
at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity and skill, 
made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his 
father his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the 
once larger family estate. He died in 1819, when his 
daughter was in her eighteenth year. To her he left the 
now world - famous farm and the bulk of his property. 
Jane, of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost 
from infancy, the tyrant of the house at Haddington, 
where her people took a place of precedence in the small 
county town. Her grandfathers, John of Penfillan and 
Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another the 
gipsy stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's 
quick and shifty tempers seem at that date to have com- 
bined in the process of "spoiling" her. The records of 
the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all point to a some- 
what masculine strength of character. Through life, it 
must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essen- 
tially " a mocking-bird," and made game of every one till 
she met her mate. The little lady was learned, reading 
Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to venture a tragedy at 
fourteen, and cynical ; writing to her life-long friend, Miss 
Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a " bottomless pit of dul- 
ness," where " all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at 
my feet." She was ruthless to the suitors — as numerous, 
says Mr. Fronde, " as those of Penelope " — who flocked 
about the young beauty, wit, and heiress. Of the discard- 
ed rivals there was only one of note — George Rennie, long- 
afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, 
very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom 
we knew here (in Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She 
dismissed him in 1821 for some cause of displeasure, " due 



hi.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 45 

to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the world ;" 
but when he came to take leave, she confesses, " I scarcely 
heard a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years 
after, in London, she went by request of his wife to Ren- 
nie's death-bed. 

Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, 
Edward Irving, and, as she, after much finesse and evasion 
admitted, came to love him in earnest. Irving saw her 
•weak points, saying she was apt to turn her powers to 
" arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and " to con- 
template the inferiority of others rather from the point 
of view of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration 
and relief." Later she retaliated, " There would have been 
no ' tongues ' had Irving married me." But he was fet- 
tered by a previous engagement, to which, after some 
struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his ward, 
as guide, philosopher, and friend, his old ally and succes- 
sor, Thomas Carlyle. Between this exceptional pair there 
begun in 1821 a relationship of constant growth in inti- 
macy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, confi- 
dences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, start- 
ing with interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by 
degrees into the dangerous friendship called Platonical. 
At the outset it was plain that Carlyle was not the St. 
Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane Welsh — a 
hasty student of Rousseau — had set in unhappy contrast 
to the honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, un- 
gainly in manner and attire, he first excited her ridicule 
even more than he attracted her esteem, and her written 
descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by Lord Chester- 
field. " He scrapes the fender, . . . only his tongue should 
be left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically 
awkward ;" but the poor mocking-bird had met lier fate. 



46 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

The correspondence falls under two sections, the critical 
and the personal. The critical consists of remarks, good, 
bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle 
began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling 
Schiller and Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch 
of deference, half conniving at her sneers. Much also 
passed between them about English authors, among them 
comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him Carlyle 
writes (April 15th, 1824) as "a pampered lord," who 
would care nothing for the £500 a year that would make 
an honest man happy ; but later, on hearing of the death at 
Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his master Goethe, he ex- 
claims : 

Alas, poor Byron ! the news of his death came upon me like a 
mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful twinge 
through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. God! that 
so many souls of mud and clay should fill up their base existence 
to the utmost bound ; and this, the noblest spirit in Europe, should 
sink before half his course was run. . . . Late so full of fire and 
generous passion and proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and 
cold. . . . Had he been spared to the age of three-score and ten 
what might he not have been ! what might he not have been ! . . . I 
dreamed of seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to 
him, he shall not return to us. 

This in answer to her account of the same intelligence : 
" I was told it all alone in a room full of people. If 
they had said the sun or the moon was gone out of the 
heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a 
more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the 
words * Byron is dead.' " Other letters of the same period, 
from London, are studded or disfigured by the incisive ill- 
natured sarcasms above referred to, or they relate to the 
work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear on the 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 47 

progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we 
look before and after, one of the saddest courtships in 
literary history. As early as 1822 Carlyle entertained 
the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife ; she had begun 
to yield to the fascinations of his speech — a fascination 
akin to that of Burns — when she wrote, " I will be happier 
contemplating my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eat- 
ing, drinking, sleeping, honest husband." In 1823 they 
were half-declared lovers, but there were recalcitrant fits 
on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh 
there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in 
which she confessed, " Nothing short of a devil could have 
tempted me to torment you and myself as I did on that 
unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had written in 
answer to his first distinct avowal, " My friend, I love you. 
But were you my brother I should love you the same. 
No. Your friend I will be . . . while I breathe the breath 
of life ; but your wife never, though you were as rich as 
Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet shall be." 
To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I 
have no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for 
the disappointment of hopes which I never seriously enter- 
tained, and had no right to entertain seriously." There 
was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phillis in this struggle 
of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, 
the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed 
by% e natural repugnance of her mother to the match, 
Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing herself with the reflec- 
tion, "Men and women may be very charming without 
having any genius ;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), " It 
lies with you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard 
and bitter Stoic," retorting, " I am not in love with you 
. . . my affections are in a state of perfect tranquillity." 



48 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Bat she admitted lie was her " only fellowship and sup- 
port," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, sur- 
rendered in the words, " Decide, and woe to me if your 
reason be your judge and not your love." In this duel of 
Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won and pressed 
his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings 
to the blind, " Without great sacrifices on both sides, the 
possibility of our union is an empty dream." At the 
eleventh hour, when, in her own words, she was " married 
past redemption," he wrote, " If you judge fit, I will take 
you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will 
this very week forswear you for ever ;" and replied to her 
request that her widowed mother might live under their 
wedded roof in terms that might have become Petruchio : 
" It may be stated in a word. The man should bear rule 
in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, 
the law of nature which no mortal departs from unpun- 
ished. . . . Will your mother consent to make me her 
guardian and director, and be a second wife to her daugh- 
ter's husband ?" 

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, 
Was ever woman in this humour won? 

Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start 
life at Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but 
Carlyle pushed another counter: "Your mother must not 
visit mine : the mere idea of such a visit argued too plainly 
that you knew nothing of the family circle in which for 
my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed 
that Mrs. Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance 
was palpably unpopular, Carlyle proposed to begin married 
life in his step-mother's vacant house, saying in effect to 
his bride-elect that as for intrusive visitors he had " nerve 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 49 

enough " to kick her old friends out of doors. The line of 
complaisance being drawn here, the bridegroom-elect had 
to soothe his sense of even this slight submission by a 
scolding letter ; while in answer to the question of finance 
he pointed out that he had £200 to start with, and that a 
labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a 
year. 

On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh 
writes, " I am resolved in spirit, in the face of every horri- 
ble fate," and says she has decided to put off mourning for 
her father, having found a second father. Carlyle proposed 
that after the " dreaded ceremony " he and his bride and 
his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach 
from Dumfries to Edinburgh. In " the last dying speech 
and marrying words " she objects to this arrangement, and 
after the event (October 17th, 1826) they drove in a post- 
chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself 
settled at Templand, had furnished a house for them. 
Meanwhile the Carlyle family migrated to Scotsbrig. There 
followed eighteen comparatively tranquil months, an oasis 
in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in some 
respects like other people. They had seats in church, and 
social gatherings — Wednesday " At Homes," to which the 
celebrity of their brilliant conversational powers attracted 
the brightest spirits of the northern capital, among them 
Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Brewster, John Wilson, 
De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, 
a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as 
Irving himself. Procter had introduced Carlyle to the 
famous editor, who, as a Scotch cousin of the Welshes, took 
from the first a keen interest in the still struggling author, 
and opened to him the door of the Edinburgh Review. 
The appearance of the article on Richter, 1827, and that, 
3 



50 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

in the course of the same year, on The State of German 
Literature, marks the beginning of a long series of splendid 
historical and critical essays — closing in 1855 with the 
Prinzenraub — which set Carlyle in the front of the re- 
viewers of the century. The success in the Edinburgh 
was an *' open sesame ;" and the conductors of the Foreign 
and Foreign Quarterly Reviews, later, those of Frazer and 
the Westminster, were ready to receive whatever the new 
writer might choose to send. 

To the Foreign Review he contributed from Comely 
Bank the Life and Writings of Werner, a paper on Helena, 
the leading episode of the second part of " Faust," and 
the first of the two great Essays on Goethe, which fixed 
his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. In 
midsummer, 1827, Carlyle received a letter from Goethe 
cordially acknowledging the Life of Schiller, and enclos- 
ing presents of books for himself and his wife. This, fol- 
lowed by a later inquiry as to the author of the article on 
German Literature, was the opening of a correspondence 
of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude on 
the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. 
Goethe assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving 
him a testimonial in a candidature for the Chair (vacant 
by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of Moral Philosophy 
at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host of the 
Carlyles, still regarded as " a jewel of advocates . . . the 
most lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, 
but in vain. The testimonials were too strong to be judi- 
cious, and "it was enough that" the candidate "was de- 
scribed as a man of original and extraordinary gifts to 
make college patrons shrink from contact with him." An- 
other failure, about the same date and with the same back- 
ing, was an application for a Professorship in London Uni- 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 61 

versity, practically under the patronage of Brougham ; yet 
another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt to write 
a novel, which having been found — better before than 
after publication — to be a failure, was for the most part 
burnt. " He could not," says Froude, " write a novel any 
more than he could write poetry. He had no invention. 1 
His genius was for fact ; to lay hold on truth, with all his 
intellect and all his imagination. He could no more in- 
vent than he could lie." 

The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are 
few: a visit from his mother; a message from Goethe 
transmitting a medal for Sir Walter Scott; sums generous- 
ly sent for his brother John's medical education in Ger- 
many ; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for start- 
ing a new Annual Register, designed to be a literary resume 
of the year, make up the record. The " rift in the lute," 
Carlyle's incapacity for domestic life, was already showing 
itself. Within the course of an orthodox honeymoon he 
had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom 
saw his wife from breakfast till 4 p.m., when they dined 
together and read Don Quixote in Spanish. The husband 
was half forgotten in the author beginning to prophesy : 
he wrote alone, walked alone, thought alone, and for the 
most part talked alone, i.e. in monologue that did not wait 
or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, 

1 Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. 
The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where 
the rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the 
dawn of "another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud 
Hapsburg," and to Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of 
Macaulay's school-boy, " Non di non homines," but it took much 
hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, and when persuaded he 
concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of cymbals ! 



52 THOMAS CAELYLE. [chap. 

but there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite 
the Review articles, Carlyle's other works, especially the 
volumes on German romance, were not succeeding, and the 
mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful if he 
could longer afford to live in Edinburgh ; he craved after 
greater quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh 
inheritance, fell vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His 
wife yielding, though with a natural repugnance to the ex- 
treme seclusion in store for her, and the Jeffreys kindly as- 
sisting, they went together in May, 1828, to the Hill of the 
Hawks. 

Craigenputtock is by no means " the dreariest spot in 
all the British dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland 
home, with wide billowy straths of grass around, inestima- 
ble silence broke only by the placid bleating of sheep, and 
the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in front. But 
in the " winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or 
apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. 
Here Carlyle allowed his wife to serve him through six 
years of household drudgery ; an offence for which he was 
never quite forgiven, and to estimate its magnitude here 
seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, 
and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he 
was as unfit, and for some of the same reasons, to make "a 
happy fireside clime" as was Jonathan Swift; and less even 
than Byron had he a share of the mutual forbearance which 
is essential to the closest of all relations. 

"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked 
everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor 
money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself." With a 
slight change of phrase the same may be said of Carlyle's 
devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain 
in his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of 



IIL ] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 53 

literature as a profession, nor any wiser words than those 
in which the veteran warns the young men, whose questions 
he answers with touching solicitude, against its adoption. 
" It should be," he declares, " the wine not the food of life, 
the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread 
of action parches up nature and makes strong souls like 
Byron dangerous, the weak despicable." But it was never- 
theless the profession of his deliberate choice, and he soon 
found himself bound to it as Ixion to his wheel. The most 
thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that 
was great, and he would do nothing little. In his deter- 
mination to pluck out the heart of the mystery, be it of 
himself, as in Sartor ; of Germany, as in his Goethes and 
Richters ; the state of England, as in Chartism and Past 
and Present ; of Cromwell or of Friedrich, he faced all 
obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he 
allowed nothing to divert or to mar his designs, least of all 
domestic cares or even duties. " Selfish he was "—I again 
quote from his biographer—" if it be selfish to be ready 
to sacrifice every person dependent on him as completely 
as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a 
house-keeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we con- 
sider that he had chosen for the latter companionship a 
woman almost as ambitious as himself, whose conversation 
was only less brilliant than his own, of delicate health and 
dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. Froude, 
in some respects " as hard as flint," with " dangerous sparks 
of fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that 
blistered and words like swords, who could declare during 
the time of the engagement, to which in spite of warnings 
manifold she clung, " I will not marry to live on less than 
my natural and artificial wants ;" who, ridiculing his accent 
to his face and before his friends, could write, " apply your 



54 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

talents to gild over the inequality of our births;" and who 
found herself obliged to live sixteen miles from the nearest 
neighbour, to milk a cow, scour floors and mend shoes— r 
when we consider all this we are constrained to admit that 
the 17 th October, 1826, was a dies nefastus, nor wonder that 
thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, " I married for am- 
bition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever 
imagined of him, and I am miserable" — and to a young 
friend, " My dear, whatever you do, never marry a man of 
genius." 

Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock 
are marked by all his aggravating inconsistency. " How 
happy we shall be in this Craig o' Putta," he writes to his 
wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th, 1827; and later to 
Goethe : 

Here Rousseau would have been as happy as ou his island of 
Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here to a 
similar disposition, and forbode me no good results. But I came 
here solely with the design to simplify my way of life, and to secure 
the independence through which I could be enabled to be true to 
myself. This bit of earth is our own ; here we can live, write, and 
think as best pleases ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to 
be crowned the monarch of literature. From some of our heights 
I can descry, about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agric- 
ola and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I 
was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me. . . . 
The only piece of any importance that I have written since I came 
here is an Essay on Burns. 

This Essay, modified at first then let alone by Jeffrey, 
appeared in the Edinburgh in the autumn of 1828. We 
turn to Carlyle's journal and find the entry, "Finished a 
paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," elsewhere referred to 
as a " gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he confesses, 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 65 

when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I 
have really had enough." 

Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Roraam. 

Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and 
in the town for the moor. Daring the first twenty years 
of his London life, in what he called "the Devil's oven," he 
is constantly clamouring to return to the den. His wife, 
more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently dis- 
liked it ; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants, and 
owl-like solitude : and she expressed her dislike in the pa- 
thetic verses, "To a Swallow Building under our Eaves," 
sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending : 

God speed thee, pretty bird ; may thy small nest 
With little ones all in good time be blest; 

I love thee much, 
For well thou managest that life of thine, 
While I ! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, 

Would I were such ! TJie Desert. 

The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by 
visits of relations and others made and repaid, an excursion 
to Edinburgh, a residence in London, and the production 
of work, the best of which has a chance of living with the 
language. One of the most interesting of the correspond- 
ences of this period is a series of letters, addressed to an 
anonymous Edinburgh friend who seems to have had some 
idea of abandoning his profession of the Law for Litera- 
ture, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. 
From these letters, which have only appeared in the columns 
of the Glasgow Herald, we may extract a few sentences : 

Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all work 
but a drudgery ? no labour for the present joyous, but grievous. A 



66 THOMAH CARLYLE. [cum: 

man who has nothing to admire except himself is in the minimum 
state. The question is, Docs a man really love Truth, or only the 
market prioe of it? Even literary men should have something else 
to do. Karnes was a lawyer, Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cob- 
bler, Burns a gauger, etc. 

The following singular passage, the style of whieli sug- 
gests an imitation of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious 
self -satire : 

You are Infinitely unjust to Blockheads, us they arc called. Ask 
yourself seriously within your own heart — what right have you to 
live Wisely in God's world, and they not to live a little wisely? Is 

there a man more to be condoled with, nay, 1 will say to be cherished 
and tenderly treated, than a man that lias no brain, My Purse is 
empty, it can be Idled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I 
can even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! 
what is to be done with my empty Hectdf 

Three of the visits of this period arc memorable. Two 
from tho Jeffreys (in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the 
same uncomfortable impression of kindness ungrudgingly 
bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a double 
interest in the household at Craigenputtock — an almost 
brotherly regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by 
the range of a keen though limited appreciation, in the 
powers of the husband, to whom he wrote : " Take care 
of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so entirely 
to you," and with a half truth, " You have no mission 
upon earth, whatever you may fancy, half so important as 
to be innocently happy." And again: "Bring your 
blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek 
shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the 
" banner with a strange device," and was either deaf or in- 
dignant. The visits passed, with satirical references from 



u< | OBAIOBNPFTTOOK, 87 

both the boit and boiteu; for Mrs. Carlyle, who could 
beroelf abundantly loofiE and icold, would allow the liberty 

to no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary oi' 
w«dl doing, Previous 1<> bil promotion as Lord Advocate 

and ooniequent transference to London, be tried to ne 
gotiato for Garlylo'i appointment ai his luoooiior in the 
editonbip of the Review, but failed to make bim accept 
tin; necoiiary conditional The paper entitled Signs of the 
TitM% was the lait production that be bad to revise fot 
in . eccentric friend, Tboie following on Taylor'i German 

Ijihiiitiire and the Characterislicn were brought out m 

i'','M niid<r tho auspices of Macvcy Napier. The other 
vi lit wa« from the most lllmtrioui of Carlyle'i Engliih* 
ipeaking friendi, in many rcipooti a fellow-worker, yet H a 
•pirit of another iort f " and destined) though a tranieen 

dental my;, lie, to ho the moat practical of bil benefactorii 
Twenty four hours of Ralph Waldo Kmer.on (often re- 

ferred to in the eourie of a long ami intimate eorre 

ipondenee) are spoken of by Mrs. Garlyhj as a visit from 

the cloudi, brightening the prevailing gray, lie oame to 
the remote inland borne with 4i the pure Intellectual 
gleam" of which Hawthorne ipeaku, and "the quiet night 
of clear fine talk" remained one of the memoriei which 
led Carlyle afterwardi to inyi "Perbapi our bappieit days 
were ipent at the Craig," Goetbe'i lettert, eipecialiy 
that in which be acknowledge! a lock of Mrs. Carlyle'i 
bair, "elnc unvergleicblicbe icbwarze Efaar locke/' were 
alio among the gleami of 1629. The great German died 
three yean later, after receiving the birthday tribute in hi* 
S2d fear from Bngliifa friendi; and it U pleaiant to re 
member that in tbii initance the diiciple wm to the end 
joyai t<> bii maiter. To tbii period belong many other 

correspondences. u I am scribble scribbling," he says in a 

3* 



58 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

letter of 1832, and mere scribbling may fill many pages 
with few headaches ; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, and 
not a page of those marvellous Miscellanies but is red with 
his life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a 
work whose fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result 
was, in some respects, the widest of his efforts. The plan 
of Sartor Resartus is far from original. Swift's Tale of 
a Tub distinctly anticipated the Clothes Philosophy; there 
are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, Jean 
Paul Richter, and other German authors : but in our days 
originality is only possible in the handling ; Carlyle has 
made an imaginary German professor the mere mouth- 
piece of his own and the higher aspiration of the Scotland 
of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as 
his Friedrich is the greatest of his works. The author 
was abundantly conscious of the value of the book, and 
superabundantly angry at the unconsciousness of the lit- 
erary patrons of the time. In 1821 he resolved if pos- 
sible to go up to London to push the prospects of this 
first-born male child. The res angusta stood in the way. 
Jeffrey, after asking his friend " what situation he could 
get him that he would detest the least," pressed on him 
"in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." 
This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully re- 
turned), was induced ultimately to accept. It has been 
said that " proud men never wholly forgive those to whom 
they feel themselves obliged," but their resenting of bene- 
fits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made his 
second visit to London to seek types for Sartor, in vain. 
Always preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, 
he vents in many pages the rage of his chagrin at the 
"Arimaspian" publishers, who would not print his book, 
and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not buy 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 59 

it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of 
five and thirty years : 

Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and August, 
1830, Teufelsdrockh was ready, and I decided to make for London ; 
night before going, how I remember it ! ... The beggarly history of 
poor Sartor among the blockheadisms is not worth recording or re- 
membering, least of all here ! In short, finding that I had got £100 
(if memory serve) for Schiller six or seven years before, and for 
Sartor, at least twice as good, I could not only not get £200, but 
even get no Murray or the like to publish it on half profits. Murray, 
a most stupendous object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the 
evidently strong wish to say " Yes " and " No " — my first signal ex- 
perience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will make it 
" No," then ; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for some two 
years from one terrified owl to another; published at last experi- 
mentally in Eraser, and even then mostly laughed at, nothing coming 
of the volume except what was sent by Emerson from America. 

This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, 
on Jeffrey's recommendation, to accept the book ; but on 
finding that Carlyle had carried the MS. to Longmans and 
another publisher, in hopes of a better bargain, and that 
it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the matter to 
his " reader," and the negotiation closed. Sartor struggled 
into half life in parts of the magazine to which the writer 
had already contributed several of his German essays, and 
it was even then published with reluctance, and on half 
pay. The reception of this work, a nondescript, yet 
among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to 
justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British 
public in general were of their worst opinion. "It is a 
heap of clotted nonsense," pronounced the Sun. " Stop 
that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of Fraser's con- 
stituents. " When is that stupid series of articles by the 
crazy tailor going to end ?" cried another. At this time 



60 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Carlyle used to say there were only two people who found 
anything in his book worth reading — Emerson and a priest 
in Cork, who said to the editor that he would take the 
magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of 
Sartor. The volume was only published in 1838, by 
Saunders and Otley, after the French Revolution had fur- 
ther raised the writer's name, and then on a guarantee 
from friends willing to take the risk of loss. It does not 
appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some 
slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in 
the Reminiscences : " I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh 
literary friends, from not one of whom did I get the 
smallest whisper even of receipt — a thing disappointing 
more or less to human nature, and which has silently and 
insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book 
to Edinburgh. . . . The plebs of literature might be di- 
vided in their verdicts about me; though by count of 
heads I always suspect the guilty clear had it; but the con- 
script fathers declined to vote at all." 1 In America Sartor 
was pieced together from JFraser, published in a volume 
introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as 
" A criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live ; 
exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present 
aspect of religion, politics, literature, and social life." The 
editors add: "We believe no book has been published 
for many years . . . which discovers an equal mastery 
over all the riches of the language. The author makes 
ample amends for the occasional eccentricity of his genius 
not only by frequent bursts of pure splendour, but by the 
wit and sense which never fail him." 

1 Tempora mutantur. A few months before Carlyle's death a 
cheap edition of Sartor was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold 
within a few weeks. 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 61 

Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on them- 
selves, but they are, more than any other nation, open to 
appreciate vigorous expressions of original views of life 
'and ethics — all that we understand by philosophy — and 
equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of the 
New England have often been the first and best testers of 
the fresh products of the Old. A land of experiment in 
all directions, ranging from Mount Lebanon to Oneida 
Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, phys- 
ical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which 
filter slowly through English soil and abide for genera- 
tions, flash over the electric atmosphere of the West. 
Hence Coleridge, Carlyle, and Browning were already ac- 
cepted as prophets in Boston while their own countrymen 
were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, 
as of a photographic plate, to receive, must be added the 
fact that the message of Sartor crossed the Atlantic when 
the hour to receive it had struck. To its publication has 
been attributed the origin of a movement that was almost 
simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's Harvard Dis- 
course. It was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in 
practice, Calvinism in theory, and precedent in Art that 
gave birth to the Transcendentalism of The Dial — a 
Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a 
place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends 
by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing 
the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To 
his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the 
elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on 
the memory of his critic — to the credit of English sym- 
pathies with the most lovable of slightly erring men — 
with more than the force of a boomerang. A sheaf of 
sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their 



62 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

half truth, e.g. to a man who excused himself for profli- 
gate journalism on the old plea, " I must live, sir." " No, 
sir, you need not live, if your body cannot be kept to- 
gether without selling your soul." Similarly he was 
abusing the periodicals — " mud," " sand," and " dust 
magazines " — to which he had contributed, inter alia, the 
great Essay on Voltaire and the consummate sketch of 
JVovalis; with the second paper on Richter to the Foreign 
Review, the reviews of History and of Schiller to Fraser, 
and that on Goethe's Works to the Foreign Quarterly. 
During this period he was introduced to Molesworth, 
Austin, and J. S. Mill. On his summons, October 1st, 
1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where he 
then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his Lon- 
don time. They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now 
lost in the delirium of tongues, and made a league of 
friendship with Mill, whom he describes as " a partial dis- 
ciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but was 
brokeu when the author of Liberty naturally found it im- 
possible to remain a disciple of the writer of Latter-Day 
Pamphlets. Mill, like Napier, was at first staggered by 
the Characteristics, though he afterwards said it was one 
of Carlyle's greatest works, and was enthusiastic over the 
review of Boswell's Johnson, published in Fraser in the 
course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's favour- 
ite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," 
had married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of 
the former he wrote as a master of threnody : to the 
bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter reminding 
him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be 
done by to his wife !" In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's 
aid, obtained a situation at £300 a year as travelling 
physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, as he promptly 



in.] CRAIGENPUTTOCK. 63 

did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been 
still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In 
the same year, when Carlyle was in London, his father 
died at Scotsbrig, after a residence there of six years. His 
son saw him last in August, 1831, when, referring to his 
Craigenputtock solitude, he said : " Man, it's surely a pity 
that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of 
Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to 
speak." 

The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic 
services, baking bread, preserving eggs, and brightening 
grates till her eyes grew dim ; he to work at his Diderot, 
doing justice to a character more alien to his own than 
even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, 
to complete the essay ; then at Count Cagliostro, also for 
Fraser, a link between his last Craigenputtock and his 
first London toils. The period is marked by shoals of let- 
ters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to Edinburgh, 
and a candidature for a University Chair, 1 which Carlyle 
thought Jeffrey could have got for him ; but the advocate 
did not, probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. 
In excusing himself he ventured to lecture the applicant on 
what he imagined to be the impracticable temper and per- 
verse eccentricity which had retarded and might continue 
to retard his advancement. Carlyle, never tolerant of re- 
buke however just, was indignant, and though an open 
quarrel was avoided by letters on both sides of courteous 
compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and 
Jeffrey has a niche in the Reminiscences as a " little man 
who meant well, but did not see far or know much." Car- 
lyle went on, however, like Thor, at the Diamond Neck- 

1 The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow. 



64 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. in. 

lace, which is a proem to the French Revolution, but inly- 
growling, " My own private impression is that I shall never 
get any, prc.^otiun lei this world." "A prophet is not 
readily acknowledged in his own country;" "Mein Leben 
geht sehr libel : all dim, misty, squally, disheartening at 
times, almost heart-breaking." This is the prose rather 
than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least 
reck his own rede. He never even tried to consume his 
own smoke. His Sartor is indeed more contained, and 
takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's Confes- 
sions, or the Sorrows of Werther, or the first two cantos of 
Chilcle Harold: but reading Byron's letters is mingling 
with a world gay and grave ; reading Goethe's walking in 
the Parthenon, though the Graces in the niches are some- 
times unclad ; reading Carlyle's is travelling through 
glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal-black 
tunnels. At last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good 
for me," and his brave wife approving, and even inciting, 
he resolved to burn his ships and seek his fortune — sink or 
swim — in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the 
initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house- 
hunt to London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the 
now famous house in Chelsea, near the Thames. 



CHAPTER IV. 

CHEYNE ROW. 
[1834-1842.] 

The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the 
bleak hills, and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the 
river Thames, winding as slowly by the reaches of Barnes 
and Battersea as Cowper's Ouse, dotted with brown-sailed 
ships and holiday boats in place of the excursion steamers 
that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle Statue 
on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle 
mansions," a stone's-throw from " Carlyle Square." Turn- 
ing up the row, we find over No. 24, formerly No. 5, the 
Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house where the 
Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, 
lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his 
headquarters, but he was a frequent wanderer. About half 
the time was occupied in trips almost yearly to Scotland, 
one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, and two to 
Germany ; besides, in the later days, constant visits to ad- 
miring friends, more and more drawn from the higher 
ranks in English society, the members of which learnt to 
appreciate his genius before he found a hearing among the 
mass of the people. 

The whole period falls readily under four sections mark- 
ing as many phases of the author's outer and inner life, 
while the same character is preserved throughout : 



66 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

I. 1834-1842— When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the 

late success of Carlyle's work relieved him from 
a long, sometimes severe struggle with narrow 
means. It is the period of the French Revolution, 
The Lectures, and Hero- Worship, and of Chartism, 
the last work with a vestige of adherence to the 
Radical creed. 

II. 1842-1853 — When the death of his mother loosened 

his ties to the North. This decade of his literary 
career is mainly signalised by the writing and 
publication of the Life and Letters of Cromwell, 
of Carlyle's political works, Past and Present and 
the Latter-Day Pamphlets, and of the Life of 
Sterling, works which mark his now consummated 
disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration 
of adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed 
of Christendom." 

III. 1853-1866— When the laurels of his triumphant 

speech as Lord Rector at Edinburgh were suddenly 
withered by the death of his wife. This period is 
filled with the History of Fredrich II., and mark- 
ed by a yet more decidedly accentuated trust in 
autocracy. 

IV. 1866-1881— Fifteen years of the setting of the 

sun. 

The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of 
rarely realised audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to 
£300 at most, could not propose to establish themselves in 
any centre of fashion. In their circumstances their choice 
of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. Chelsea, 

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
Beyond it, 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 67 

was, even in those days of less constant communication, 
within measurable distance of the centres of London life : it 
had then and still preserves a host of interesting historic and 
literary traditions. Among the men who in old times lived 
or met together in that outlying region of London, We 
have memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the 
Essayists Addison and Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is 
the tomb of Bolingbroke and the square of Sir Hans 
Sloane ; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street ; 
nearer our own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later 
George Eliot, W. B. Scott, Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for 
a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle came to 
settle there, Leigh Hunt 1 in Upper Cheyne Row, an almost 
next-door neighbour, was among the first of a series of vis- 
itors; always welcome, despite his "hugger-mugger" house- 
hold and his borrowing tendencies, his " unpractical mes- 
sages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright 
"singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often 
subtle criticisms and constant good-humour. To the Chel- 
sea home, since the Mecca of many pilgrims, there also 
flocked other old Ampton Street friends, drawn thither by 
genuine regard. Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss 
Cushman and all competent judges, was a "raconteur un- 
paralleled." To quote the same authority, " that wonderful 
woman, able to live in the full light of Carlyle's genius 
without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar skill in 
drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. 

1 Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle 
deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which 
amply justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more 
slightly of his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the Ex- 
aminer, of the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend 
now " beginning to be somebody." 



68 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Barns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of 
which the close of our century — when every fresh thought 
is treasured to be printed and paid for — knows little but 
the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might have heen 
said, " There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol 
misses fire he knocks you down with the butt:" both men 
would have benefited by revolt from their dictation, but 
the power to contradict either was overborne by a superior 
power to assert. Swift's occasional insolence, in like man- 
ner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength that made 
him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later 
times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or 
of being overmatched ; but there was no Wellington found 
for this " grand Napoleon of the realms" of prose. His 
reverence for men, if not for things, grew weaker with the 
strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men 
of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and 
Carlyle — in this respect more akin to Johnson than to 
Swift — had the acquired material to serve as fuel for the 
inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his criticisms 
are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation 
should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of 
correspondence in the case of a man who had a mania for 
pouring out his moods to all and sundry ; but where Car- 
lyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, his 
memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, 
referring to the Chelsea days, he says, " The best of those 
who then flocked about us was Leigh Hunt," who never 
seriously said him nay ; " and the worst Lamb," who was 
not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that 
Carlyle's best adviser and most candid critic might have 
been John Stuart Mill, for whom he long felt as much re- 
gard as it was possible for him to entertain towards a 



iv.] CHEYNE KOW. 69 

proximate equal. The following is characteristic : " He 
had taken a great attachment to me (which lasted about 
ten years and then suddenly ended, I never knew how), an 
altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, affectionate young 
man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt to 
be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form 
traceable in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Tay- 
lor, " She was a will-o'-the-wispish iridescence of a creature ; 
meaning nothing bad either;" and again of Mill himself, 
" His talk is sawdustisb, like ale when there is no wine to 
be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, 
may be relieved by reference to the close of two friend- 
ships to which (though even these were clouded by a touch 
of personal jealousy) he was faithful in the main ; for the 
references of both husband and wife to Irving's " delira- 
tions" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. 
Their last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was 
in October, 1834, when he came on horseback to the door 
of their new home, and left with the benediction to his 
lost Jane, u You have made a little Paradise around you." 
He died in Glasgow in the December of the same year, 
and his memory is pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's 
threnody. The final phases of another old relationship 
were in some degree similar. During the first years of 
their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne 
Row, and sent kind letters to his cousin, received by her 
husband with the growl, " I am at work stern and grim, 
not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic flourish of epis- 
tolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one 
visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the 
autumn of 1849, " worn in body and thin in mind," "grown 
lunar now and not solar any more." Three months later 
he heard of the death of this benefactor of his youth, and 



70 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second 
volume of the Reminiscences. 

The work " stern and grim " was the French Revolution, 
the production of which is the dominant theme of the first 
chapter of Carlyle's London life. Mr. Froude, in the course 
of an estimate of this work which leaves little room for 
other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written for a 
purpose, i.e. to show that rulers, like those of the French 
in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleas- 
ures and oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being 
" burnt up." This, doubtless, is one of the morals of the 
French Revolution — the other being that anarchy ends in 
despotism — and unquestionably a writer who never ceased 
to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Car- 
lyle's peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a 
prophet and of an artist, and that while now the one, now 
the other, was foremost, he never wholly forgot the one in 
the other. In this instance he found a theme well fit for 
both, and threw his heart into it, though under much dis- 
couragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he 
had put work enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy 
of him ; while his Sartor had, on this side of the Atlantic, 
been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, never uncon- 
scious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt 
like a knight who had performed his vigils, and finding 
himself still ignored, became a knight of the rueful coun- 
tenance. Thoroughly equipped, adept enough in ancient 
tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German and a 
fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from 
Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "trag- 
ically hard," exclaiming, " I could learn to do all things I 
have seen done, and am forbidden to try any of them." 
The efforts to keep the wolf from his own doors were harder 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 71 

than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in 
London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made 
way in the usual ruts ; but he would have none of them, 
and refused to accept the employment which is the most 
open, as it is the most lucrative, to literary aspirants. To 
nine out of ten the " profession of literature " means Jour- 
nalism ; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always 
conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of 
the sects, essentially a nonconformist; he not only dis- 
dained to write a word he did not believe, he would not 
suppress a word he did believe — a rule of action fatal to 
swift success. During these years there began an acquaint- 
ance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which 
are enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. 
Carlyle's relation to John Sterling drew out the sort of af- 
fection which best suited him — the love of a master for a 
pupil, of superior for inferior, of the benefactor for the 
benefited ; and consequently there is no line in the record 
of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, 
and perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to 
his father, then the editor of the Times, and the latter 
promptly invited the struggling author to contribute to its 
columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the implied 
conditions . . . when a man enlists in the army, his soul as 
well as his body belong to his commanding officer." Car- 
lyle talked, all his life, about what his greatest disciple 
calls " The Lamp of Obedience ;" but he himself would 
obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who 
did not see with his eyes. He rejected — we trust in polite 
terms — the offer of " the Thunderer." " In other respects 
also," says our main authority, " he was impracticable, un- 
malleable, and as independent and wilful as if he were the 
heir to a peerage. He had created no * public ' of his 



72 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

own ; the public which existed could not understand his 
writings and would not buy them ; and thus it was that in 
Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in 
Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of literary socie- 
ty, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, 
but when crossed he was not only " sarcastic " but rude, 
and speaking of people, as he wrote of them, with various 
shades of contempt, naturally gave frequent offence. Those 
whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, justifiably re- 
taliate. " Are you looking for your t-t-turban V Charles 
Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby 
after listening for an evening to his invectives, and the 
phrase may have rankled in Carlyle's mind. Living in a 
glass case, while throwing stones about, supersensitive to 
criticism though professing to despise critics, he made at 
least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confes- 
sion became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of 
Sartor, we do not wonder to find him writing in 1833 : 

It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the craft of 
literature, and yet I know no fault I have committed. ... I am tempt- 
ed to go to America. ... I shall quit literature, it does not invite me. 
Providence warns me to have done with it. I have failed in the Di- 
vine Infernal Universe. 

Or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering 
about the world like Teufelsdrockh, looking for a rest for 
the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with incompa- 
rable naivete, he was asserting : 

The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my feeling 
of natural superiority to them. . . . The literary world here is a thing 
which I have no other course left me but to defy. ... I can reverence 
no existing man. With health and peace for one year, I could write 
a better book than there has been in this country for generations. 



iv.] CHEYNE KOW. Is 

All through his journal and his correspondence there is 
a perpetual alternation of despair and confidence, always 
closing with the refrain, " Working, trying is the only re- 
mover of doubt," and wise counsels often echoed from 
Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, 
and the next step will become clear ;" on the other hand — 

A man must not only be able to work but to give over working. 
... If a man wait till he has entirely brushed off his imperfections, 
he will spin for ever on his axis, advancing no whither. . . . The French 
Revolution stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investi- 
gate much more about it, but to splash down what I know in large 
masses of colours, that it may look like a smoke and flame conflagra- 
tion in the distance. 

The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity 
familiar to every reader, but it must be referred to as 
throwing one of the finest lights on his character. Car- 
lyle's closest intellectual link with J. S. Mill was their com- 
mon interest in French politics and literature ; the latter, 
himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only 
surrendered in favour of the man whose superior pictorial 
genius he recognised, but supplied him freely with the 
books he had accumulated for the enterprise. His interest 
in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him 
to borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the 
early spring of 1835, and his business habits so defective 
as to permit him to leave it lying about when read, so that, 
as appears from the received accounts, it was mistaken by 
the servant for waste paper ; certainly it was destroyed ; 
and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such 
a desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems 
to have been to console his friend. According to Mrs. 
Carlyle, as reported by Froude, " the first words her hus- 
4 



14: THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

band uttered as the door closed were, ' Well, Mill, poor 
fellow, is terribly cut up ; we must endeavour to hide from 
him how very serious this business is to us.' " This trait 
of magnanimity under the first blow of a disaster which 
seemed to cancel the work of years 1 should be set against 
his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, Lamb, 
Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. 

Mill sent a cheque of £200 as " the slightest external 
compensation " for the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, 
procured the acceptance of half the sum. Carlyle here, as 
in every real emergency, bracing his resolve by courageous 
words, as " never tine heart or get provoked heart," set 
himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls 
that of Scott rebuilding his ruined estate ; but the work 
was at first so " wretched " that it had to be laid aside for 
a season, during which the author wisely took a restorative 
bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The re-writ- 
ing of the first volume was completed in September, 1835 ; 
the whole book in January, 1837. The mood in which it 
was written throws a light on the excellences as on the. 
defects of the history. The Reminiscences again record 
the gloom and defiance of " Thomas the Doubter " walk- 
ing through the London streets " with a feeling similar 
to Satan's stepping the burning marl," and scowling at 
the equipages about Hyde Park corner, sternly thinking, 
"Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I 
shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle 
and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." 
In an adjacent page he reports himself as having said to 
his wife : ' f 

1 Oarlyle had only been writing the volume for. five months ; but 
he was 1 preparing for it during much of his life at'Oraigenputtock. 



it.] CHEYNE ROW. 75 

What they will do with this book none knows, my lass ; but they have 
not had for two hundred years any book that came more truly from a 
man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as they 
see best. . . .•" They cannot trample that," she would cheerily answer. 

This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's 
spell and the limits of his lasting power. His works were 
written seldom with perfect fairness, never with the dry 
light required for a clear presentation of the truth ; they 
have all "an infusion from the will and the affections;" 
but they were all written with a whole sincerity and utter 
fervour ; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through 
the air " like rockets druv' by their own burning." Con- 
sequently his readers confess that he has never forgot the 
Horatian maxim — 

Si vis me flere dolendum est, 
Primum ipsi tibi. 

About this time Carlyle writes, " My friends think I 
have found the art of living upon nothing," and there 
must, despite of Mill's contribution, have been " bitter 
thrift" in Cheyne Row during the years 1835-1837. He 
struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting 
for the sale of a great work by help of fees derived from 
his essays on the Diamond Necklace (which, after being 
refused by the Foreign Quarterly, appeared in Fraser, 
1837), that on Mirabeau in the Westminster, and in the 
following year, for the same periodical, the article on Sir 
Walter Scott. To the last work, undertaken against the 
grain, he refers in one of the renewed wails of the year: 
" O that literature had never been devised. I am scourged 
back to it by the whip of necessity." The circumstance 
may account for some of the manifest defects of one of 
the least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer reviews. Frequent 



76 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

references in previous letters show that he never appre- 
ciated Scott, to whom he refers as a mere Restaurateur. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the French Revolution had 
brought the name of its author, then in his forty-third 
year, for the first time prominently before the public. It 
attracted the attention of Thackeray, who wrote a gener- 
ous review in the Times, of Southey, Jeffrey, Macaulay, 
Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an 
equal, if sometimes an adverse power in the world of let- 
ters. But, though the book established his reputation, the 
sale was slow, and for some years the only substantial profits, 
amounting to about £400, came from America, through 
the indefatigable activity and good management of Emer- 
son. It is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting 
volumes of their Correspondence which shows that in this 
instance the benefited understood his financial relation to 
the benefactor: "A reflection I cannot but make is that, 
at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny of it be- 
longed to me by any law except that of helpful friendship. 
I feel as if I could not examine it without a kind of crime." 
Others who, at this period, made efforts to assist " the 
polar Bear " were less fortunate. In several instances good 
intentions paved the palace of Momus, and in one led a 
well-meaning man into a notoriously false position. Mr. 
Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered 
the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at 
a salary of £200, and so brought upon his memory a tor- 
rent of contempt. Undeterred by this and similar warn- 
ings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet Mar- 
tineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection 
for " this side of the street," and was afterwards an object 
of their joint ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a 
course of lectures to an audience collected by canvass to 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 11 

hear the strange being from the moors talk for an hour on 
end about literature, morals, and history. He was then an 
object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him 
at all, and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an 
honourable employment. The "good Harriet," so called 
by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, aided by other 
kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles — the former 
including Frederick Denison Maurice — made so great a 
success of the enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The 
first course of six lectures on "German Literature," May, 
1857, delivered in Wills's Rooms, realised £135; the sec- 
ond of twelve, on the " History of European Literature," 
at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of 
£300; the third, in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," 
brought £200 ; the fourth, on " Heroes," the same. In 
closing this course Carlyle appeared for the last time on a 
public platform until 1866, when he delivered his Inau- 
gural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. 
The impression he produced on his unusually select au- 
diences was that of a man of genius, but roughly clad. 
The more superficial auditors had a new sensation, those who 
came to stare remained to wonder ; the more reflective felt 
that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had no 
inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he lat- 
terly so derided ; he was able to speak from a few notes ; 
but there were comments more or less severe on his man- 
ner and style. J. Grant, in his Portraits of Public Char- 
acters, says: "At times he distorts his features as if sud- 
denly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes 
mouths; he has a harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." 
Leigh Hunt, in the Examiner, remarks on the lecturer's 
power of extemporising ; but adds that he often touches 
only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impres- 



18 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

sion left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, 
liberalised by German philosophy. Bunscn, present at one 
of the lectures, speaks of the striking and rugged thoughts 
thrown at people's heads ; and Margaret Fuller, afterwards 
Countess D'Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed by 
" the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron 
into sunset red." Carlyle's own comments are for the 
most part slighting. He refers to his lectures as a mixture 
of prophecy and play-acting, and says that when about to 
open his course on " Heroes " he felt like a man going to 
be hanged. To Emerson, April 17th, 1839, he writes: 

My lectures come on this day two weeks. heaven ! I cannot 
" speak ;" I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to 
gods and fashionables — being forced to it by want of money. In 
five weeks I shall be free, and then — ! Shall it be Switzerland? 
shall it be Scotland ? nay, shall it be America and Concord ? 

Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the 
Miscellanies (first there collected), and was continually 
urging his friend to emigrate and speak to more appre- 
ciative audiences in the States; but the London lectures, 
which had, with the remittances from over sea, practically 
saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him de- 
cide " to turn his back to the treacherous Syren " — the 
temptation to sink into oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation 
and defence of this decision may be clenched by a refer- 
ence to the warning his master had received. He had an- 
nounced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been 
taken at his word ; but similarly had Edward Irving, who 
for a season of sun or glamour gathered around him the 
same crowd and glitter : the end came ; twilight and clouds 
of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder 
Annandale youth — as to the recitatives of the younger — 



iv.] CnEYNE ROW. 79 

to see a wild man of the woods and hear him sing; but 
the novelty gone, they passed on "to Egyptian crocodiles, 
Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with "unquiet 
fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circacan draft,." ex- 
claimed his old admirer in his fine dirge, " thou poison of 
popular applause, madness is in thee and death, thy end is 
Bedlam and the grave," and with the fixed resolve, " De 
me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on this phase 
of his life. 

The lectures on " Hero-Worship " (a phrase taken from 
Hume) were published in 1841, and met with considerable 
success, the name of the writer having then begun to run 
" like wildfire through London." At the close of the pre- 
vious year he had published his long pamphlet on Chart- 
ism, it having proved unsuitable for its original destination 
as an article in the Quarterly. Here first he clearly enun- 
ciates, " Might is right " — one of the few strings on which, 
with all the variations of a political Paganini, he played 
through life. This tract is on the border line between the 
old modified Radicalism of Sartor and the less modified 
Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still 
speaks of himself as a man foiled ; but at the close of that 
year all fear of penury was over, and in the following he 
was able to refuse a Chair of History at Edinburgh, as 
later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical 
power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge 
appeared in his foundation of the London Library, which 
brought him into more or less close contact with Tenny- 
son, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, and 
other leaders of the thought and action of the time. 

There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be 
called eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired 



80 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

scholar, a thinker demanding sympathy while craving after 
solitude, and the frequent inconsistency of the two require- 
ments was the source of much of his unhappiness. Our 
authorities, for all that we do not see in his published 
works, are found in his voluminous correspondence, copi- 
ous autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of 
his wife's letters and journal dating from the commence- 
ment of the struggle for recognition in London, and ex- 
tending to the year of her death. Criticism of these re- 
markable documents, the theme of so much controversy, 
belongs rather to a life of Mrs. Carlyle ; but a few salient 
facts may here be noted. It appears on the surface that 
husband and wife had in common several marked peculiar- 
ities ; on the intellectual side they had not only an extraor- 
dinary amount, but the same kind of ability, superhumanly 
keen insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with 
tongue and pen ; the same intensity of feeling, thorough- 
ness, and courage to look the ugliest truths full in the face ; 
in both, these high qualities were marred by a tendency to 
attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their 
joint contempt for all whom they called "fools," i.e. the 
immense majority of mankind, was a serious drawback to 
the pleasure of their company. It is indeed obvious that, 
whether or not it be correct to say that " his nature was 
the soft one, hers the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer 
cynic of the two. Much of her writing confirms the im- 
pression of those who have heard her talk that no one, not 
even her husband, was safe from the shafts of her ridicule. 
Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is improb- 
able that she would have tolerated from any outsider a 
breath of adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many 
liberties she would not grant. Clannish almost as Carlyle 
himself, even her relations are occasionally made to appear 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 81 

ridiculous. There was nothing in her affections, save her 
memory of her own father, corresponding to his devotion 
to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater 
scorn, she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such 
limited union as was granted to her married life had only 
soured the mocking-bird spirit of the child that derided 
her grandfather's accent on occasion of his bringing her 
back from a drive by another route to " varry the shane." 
Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to 
such powers of endurance as might justify his later attacks 
on Byron. 

But neither had his wife any real reticence. Whenever 
there were domestic troubles — flitting, repairing, building, 
etc., on every occasion of clamour or worry, he, with scarce 
pardonable oblivion of physical delicacy greater than his 
own, went off, generally to visit distinguished friends, and 
left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She 
performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties 
with a practical genius that he complimented as "trium- 
phant." She performed them, ungrudgingly perhaps, but 
never without complaint; her invariable practice was to 
endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John 
Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no 
woman who values peace of soul ever marry an author;" 
and again to the same in 1839, " Carlyle had to sit on a 
jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, physical, 
moral, and intellectual," but " one gets to feel a sort of in- 
difference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in 
the case of the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, 
have been seen, within or almost within our memories, but 
as a rule it is a risk for two supersensitive and nervous 
people to live together; when they are sensitive in oppo- 
site ways the alliance is fatal ; fortunately the Carlyles 
4* 



82 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most 
of the household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a 
space in the letters and journals of both — papering, plas- 
tering, painting, deceitful or disorderly domestics — general 
readers have so little concern that they have reason to re- 
sent the number of pages wasted in printing them ; but 
there was one common grievance of wider interest, to 
which we have before and must here again finally refer, 
premising that it affected not one period but the whole of 
their lives, i.e. their constant, only half effectual struggle 
with the modern Hydra-headed monster, the reckless and 
needless Noises produced or permitted, sometimes increased 
rather than suppressed by modern civilization. Mrs. Car- 
lyle suffered almost as much as her husband from these 
murderers of sleep and assassins of repose ; on her mainly 
fell the task of contending with the Cochin-chinas, whose 
senseless shrieks went " through her like a sword," of 
abating a " Der Freischutz of cats," or a pandemonium of 
barrel-organs, of suppressing macaws for which Carlyle 
" could neither think nor live ;" now mitigating the scales 
on a piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from 
their neighbours a shoal of " demon fowls ;" lastly, of super- 
intending the troops of bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers 
employed, with partial success, to convert the top story of 
5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her hard-won 
victories in this field must have agreeably added to the 
sense of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her 
assertion, " Instead of boiling up individuals into the spe- 
cies, I would draw T a chalk circle round every individuality," 
is the essence of much of her mate's philosophy ; but, in 
the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly protests 
against her own absorption : " In spite of the honestest 
efforts to annihilate my I — ity or merge it in what the 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 83 

world doubtless considers my better half, I still find my- 
self a self-subsisting, and, alas, self-seeking me." The ever 
restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the 
dominant notes of her journal, the other is the sense of 
being even within the circle unrecognized. "C. is a do- 
mestic wandering Jew. . . . When he is at work I hardly 
ever see his face from breakfast to dinner." ..." Poor 
little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half- 
buried ... in some intermediate state between the living 
and the dead. . . . Oh, so lonely !" These are among the 
suspiria de profundis of a life which her husband compared 
to " a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, whom 
he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming. 
"Solitude, indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad 
like Bedlam ; absence of delirium is possible only for me 
in solitude ;" a sentiment almost literally acted on. In his 
offering of penitential cypress, referring to his wife's de- 
light in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She 
flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during 
their joint lives their numerous visits and journeys were 
made at separate times or apart. They crossed continu- 
ally on the roads up and down, but when absent wrote to 
one another often the most affectionate letters. Their at- 
traction increased, contrary to Kepler's law, in the direct 
ratio of the square of the distance, and when it was 
stretched beyond the stars the long latent love of the sur- 
vivor became a worship. 

Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood 
and bone of his bone, did not wait for any death to make 
itself declared. His veneration for his mother was recip- 
rocated by a confidence and pride in him unruffled from 
cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic differ- 
ences, for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to 



84 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

have practically shared his belief, "it matters little what 
a man holds in comparison with how he holds it." But 
on his wife's side the family bond was less absolute, and 
the fact adds a tragic interest to her first great bereave- 
ment after the settlement in London. There were many 
callers — increasing in number and eminence as time went 
on — at Cheyne Row, but naturally few guests. Among 
these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, in 1838, her first and 
last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant friction. 
Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the 
gipsy vein) had been in early years a beauty and a woman 
of fashion, endowed with so much natural ability that Car- 
lyle, not altogether predisposed in her favour, confessed she 
had just missed being a genius ; but she was accustomed 
to have her way, and old Walter of Penfillan confessed 
to having seen her in fifteen different humours in one 
evening. Welcomed on her arrival, misunderstandings 
soon arose. Carlyle himself had to interpose with concil- 
iatory advice to his wife to bear with her mother's hu- 
mours. One household incident, though often quoted, is 
too characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an even- 
ing party, Mrs. Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not 
display, were perhaps larger than those suited for her still 
struggling hosts, had lighted a show of candles for the en- 
tertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with an 
air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which 
her mother resented with tears. The penitent daughter, 
in a mood like that which prompted Johnson to stand in 
the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will that the can- 
dles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round 
which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. 
Carlyle has recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law 
in a few of his many graphic touches. It was at Dumfries, 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. 85 

in 1841, where she had brought Jane down from Temp- 
land to meet and accompany him back to the south. 
They parted at the door of the little inn, with deep, sup- 
pressed emotion, perhaps overcharged by some presenti- 
ment, Mrs. Welsh looking sad but bright, and their last 
glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet waving down 
the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of Feb- 
ruary, 1842, news came that she had had an apoplectic 
stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried north, stopping to break 
the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool ; when there 
she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her 
mother's death that she was prohibited from going fur- 
ther, and Carlyle came down from London in her stead. 
On reaching Templand he found that the funeral had al- 
ready taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as ex- 
ecutor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previ- 
ous will, devolved on his wife. To her during the interval 
he wrote a series of pathetic letters. Reading these — 
which, with others from Haddington in the following 
years, make an anthology of tenderness and truth, reading 
them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's 
own accounts of the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers 
over petty cares ; or worse, his ebullitions of jealousy as- 
suming the masque of contempt, we again revert to the 
biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said 
of Carlyle, and more : " It seemed as if his soul was di- 
vided, like the Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, 
and the other in the place opposite heaven. But the mis- 
ery had its origin in the same sensitiveness of nature 
which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emo- 
tion. Men of genius . . . are like the wind-harp which 
answers to the breath that touches it, now low and sweet, 
now rising into wild swell or angry scream, as the strings 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

are swept by some passing gush." This applies complete- 
ly to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to 
the Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. 

The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the 
husband and wife more closely together, brought to an 
end a dispute in which for once Mrs. Carlyle had her way. 
During the eight years over which we have been glancing, 
Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea 
life : the restless spirit, which never found peace on this 
side of the grave, was constantly goading him with an im- 
pulse of flight and change, from land to sea, from shore to 
hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed better 
than where he was. America and the Teufelsdrockh wan- 
derings abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to 
his own haunts. A letter to Emerson in 1839 best ex- 
presses his prevalent feeling : 

This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont : and as for my 
particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. Nay, there 
are many in it that have a real friendliness for me. . . . The worst is 
the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on 
such a poor, excitable set of nerves as mine. The velocity of all 
things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate; 
joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain ; there is no wish 
one has so pressingly as for quiet. Ah me ! I often swear I will be 
buried at least in free, breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub 
... if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will 
fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. 

The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh 
leaving to his wife and himself practically from £200 to 
£300 a year ; why not finally return to the home of their 
early married life, "in reducta valle caniculae," with no 
noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of 
sheep ? Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its 



iv.] CHEYNE ROW. SI 

"four walls" they would begin a calmer life. Fortunate- 
ly, Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical instinct was never 
at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself resolutely 
against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm 
for her — a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. 
Aitken, saying, " I could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dum- 
fries but cry from morning to night." She herself had 
enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she knew that with- 
in a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den 
and lamenting Cheyne Row. He gave way with the pro- 
test, " I cannot deliberately mean anything that is harmful 
to you," and certainly it was well for him. 

There is no record of an original writer or artist coming 
from the north of our island to make his mark in the 
south, succeeding, and then retracing his steps. Had Car- 
lyle done so, he would probably have passed from the 
growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find 
on the whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual os- 
tracism. Scotland may be breezy, but it is not conspicu- 
ously free. Erratic opinions, when duly veiled, are gener- 
ally allowed ; but this concession is of little worth. On 
the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in any- 
thing, Carlyle, thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and 
the litterateurs of his tribe, expressed himself with incisive 
and memorable truth : " It is but doubt and indifference. 
Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own self- 
conceit : they are rattlesnakes then." * Tolerance for the 
frank expression of views which clash with the sincere or 
professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in 
Scotland rarest. Episcopalians, high and broad, were con- 
tent to condone the grim Calvinism that still infiltrated 

1 The italics are Mr. Froude's. 



88 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. iv. 

Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at worst, at his idolatry 
of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall die the 
death." But the reproach of " Pantheism " was for long 
fatal to his reception across the Tweed. 

Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that 
London was "among improper places" the best for " writ- 
ing books, after all the one use of living " for him ; its in- 
habitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked with," 
and its aristocracy — the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Rus- 
sells, Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through 
life — its " choicest specimens." Other friendships equally 
valued he made among the leading authors of the age. 
Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirl wall. 
Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the French 
Revolution and of Chartism. Thackeray admired and re- 
viewed him well. Even in Macaulay, condemned to limbo 
under the suspicion of having reviewed him ill, he found, 
when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of better 
things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article 
in the Westminster, which gave him intense pleasure ; for 
while contemning it in almost the same words as Byron did, 
he loved praise equally well. In 1840 he had crossed the 
Rubicon that lies between aspiration and attainment. The 
populace might be blind or dumb, the " rattlesnakes " — the 
" irresponsible indolent reviewers," who, from behind a 
hedge pelt every wrestler till they found societies for the 
victor — might still obscurely hiss; but Carlyle was at 
length safe by the verdict of the " Conscript Fathers." 



CHAPTER V. 

CHEYNE ROW. 
[1842-1853.] 

The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, 
few friends, and little fame had succeeded : but it had been 
a terrible risk, and the struggle had left scars behind it. 
To this period of his life we may apply Carlyle's words — 
made use of by himself at a later date — " The battle was 
over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed 
knight of modern chivalry, who sounded the reveille for an 
onslaught on the citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet 
of the future that his name is likely to endure in the 
history of English thought. He has also a place with Scott 
amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded 
their annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim 
was that expressed by Tennyson to " steal fire from fount- 
ains of the past," but his design was to admonish rather 
than " to glorify the present." This is the avowed object 
of the second of his distinctly political works, which, fol- 
lowing on the track of the first, Chartism, and written in 
a similar spirit, takes higher artistic rank. Past and 
Present, suggested by a visit to the almshouse of St. Ives 
and reading the chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond, was 
undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a 
greater work, the duty he felt laid upon him to say some- 
thing that should bear directly on the welfare of the peo- 



90 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

pie, especially of the poor around him. It was an impulse 
similar to that which inspired Oliver Twist, but Carlyle's 
remedies were widely different from those of Dickens. 
Not merely more kindness and sympathy but paternal 
government, supplying work to the idle inmates of the 
workhouse, and insisting by force if need be on it being 
done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot Samson's way 
in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Ed- 
munds, and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain ser- 
mon, to recommend it to the Ministers Peel and Russell. 

In this mood the book was written off in the first seven 
weeks of 1843, a tour de force comparable to Johnson's 
writing of Passelas, and published in April. It at once 
made a mark by the opposition as well as by the approval 
it excited. Criticism of the work — of its excellences, which 
are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold — belongs to 
a review of the author's political philosophy : it is enough 
here to note that it was remarkable in three ways. First, 
the object of its main attack, laissez /aire, being a definite 
one, it was capable of having and had some practical ef- 
fect. Mr. Fronde exaggerates when he says that Carlyle 
killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy ; 
for the fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, 
Ricardo, and Mill cannot be killed : but he pointed out 
that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, the laws of supply and 
demand must be made to bend ; as Mathematics made 
mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics 
leave us a little room for charity. There is ground to be- 
lieve that the famous Factory Acts owed some of their 
suggestions to Past and Present. Carlyle always speaks 
respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard 
Milnes saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, " at 
the Shuttleworths that Lord Ashley was the greatest man 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 91 

alive: he was the only man that Carlyle praised in his 
book. I dare sav he knew I was overhearing him." But, 
while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthro- 
pists, his protests against philanthropy as an adequate solu- 
tion of the problem of human misery became more pro- 
nounced. About the date of the conception of this book 
we find in the Journal : 

Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the duty 
of a citizen to paint mere heroisms. . . . Live to make others happy ! 
Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is 
not the aim of my life. ... it is mere hypocrisy to call it such, as is 
continually done nowadays. . . . Avoid cant. Do not think that 
your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe 
and set up. 

Past and Present, in the second place, is notable as the 
only considerable consecutive book — unless we also except 
the Life of Sterling — which the author wrote without 
the accompaniment of wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. 
Thirdly, though marking a stage in his mental progress, 
the fusion of the refrains of Chartism and Hero - Worship, 
and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, the 
book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe 
travail with his greatest contribution to English history. 
The last rebuff which Carlyle encountered came, by curious 
accident, from the Westminster, to which Mill had en- 
gaged him to contribute an article on " Oliver Cromwell." 
While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the 
country on account of his health, and gave the review in 
charge of an Aberdonian called Robertson, who wrote to 
stop the progress of the essay with the message that he 
had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle 
was angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. 



92 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

aside, he set about constructing on its basis a History of 
the Civil War. 

Numerous visits and tours during the following three 
years, though bringing him into contact with new and 
interesting personalities, were mainly determined by the 
resolve to make himself acquainted with the localities of 
the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to 
give colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern 
English prose. In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from 
Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and the same year, after a 
brief yachting trip to Belgium — in the notes on which the 
old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's 
verse — he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathe- 
dral, where Oliver two centuries before had called out to 
the recalcitrant Anglican in the pulpit, " Cease your fool- 
ing and come down." In July, 1843, Carlyle made a trip 
to South Wales ; first to visit a worthy devotee called Red- 
mond, and then to Bishop Thirl wall near Carmarthen. 
"A right solid, simple-hearted, robust man, very strangely 
swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of one of our 
most classic historians. 

On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of 
Worcester. Passing his wife at Liverpool, where she was 
a guest of her uncle, and leaving her to return to London 
and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon from 
Llanberis to Beddgelert, with his brother John. lie next 
proceeded to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then 
to Dunbar, which he contrived to visit on the 3d of Sep- 
tember, an anniversary revived in his pictured page with a 
glow and force to match which we have to revert to 
Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the Revenge. From 
Dunbar he returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his 
always admired and admiring friend Erskine, of Linlathen, 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 93 

a Scotch broad churchman of the type of F. D. Maurice 
and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in 
earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided 
to abandon the design of a History, and to make his book 
a Biography of Cromwell, interlacing with it the main 
features and events of the Commonwealth. The difficulties 
even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his 
groans at every stage in its progress were " louder and 
more loud," e.g., " My progress in Cromwell is frightful." 
1 " A thousand times I regretted that this task was ever 
taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever be- 
fore tried," and at the close, " Cromwell I must have 
written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a 
continual toil and misery to me ; four years of abstruse 
toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, and misery I 
used to count it had cost me." The book, issued in 1845, 
soon went through three editions, and brought the author 
to the front as the most original historian of his time. 
Macaulay was his rival, but in different paths of the same 
field. About this time Mr. Froude became his pupil, and 
has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his 
master's influence over the Oxford of those days which 
would be only spoilt by selections. Oxford, like Athens, 
ever longing after something new, patronised the Chelsea 
prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted cynicism. 
But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with 
the strong personality of each, always loyal ; and the capac- 
ity inborn in both, the power to breathe life into dry 
records and dead stones had at least an added impulse 
from their master. 

The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the 
Foreign Quarterly of the essay on Dr. Francia, and by the 
death of John Sterling — loved with the love of David for 



94 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Jonathan — outside his own family losses, the greatest 
wrench in Carlyle' s life. Sterling's published writings are 
?s inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains 
of Arthur Hallam ; but in friendships, especially unequal 
friendships, personal fascination counts for more than half, 
and all are agreed as to the charm in both instances of the 
inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given 
a somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergy- 
man, Carlyle three years later, in 1851, published his own 
impressions of his friend as a thinker, sane philanthropist, 
and devotee of truth, in a work that, written in a three 
months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though faltering, 
as prose after verse, with Adonais, In Memoriam, and Mat- 
thew Arnold's Thy r sis. 

These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtru- 
sive benevolence, the memory of which has been in some 
cases accidentally rescued from the oblivion to which the 
benefactor was willing to have them consigned. Carlyle 
never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Words- 
worth, frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as gen- 
erous in giving as he was ungenerous in judging. His 
assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the Purgatory of 
Suicides, his time spent in answering letters of " anxious 
enquirers" — letters that nine out of ten busy men would 
have flung into the waste-paper basket — his interest in such 
works as Samuel Bamford's Life of a Radical, and admi- 
rable advice to the writer; 1 his instructions to a young 

1 These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the working- 
men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a 
sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes : " We want more knowledge 
about the Lancashire operatives ; their miseries and gains, virtues 
and vices. Winnow what you have to say, and give us wheat free 
from chaff. Then the rich captains of workers will be willing to 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 95 

student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to 
another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in 
the storm, that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a 
veined humanity." The same epoch, however — that of the 
start of the great writer's almost uninterrupted triumph — 
brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate and dif- 
ficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. 

Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having 
one of the most powerful intellects, and by far the greatest 
-command of language among his contemporaries, was be- 
ginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown in being 
beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also 
enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opin- 
ion made his acquaintance ; he was a frequent guest of the 
genial Maecenas, an admirer of genius though no mere wor- 
shipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes ; meeting Hallam, 
Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and afterwards 
visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future 
Lord Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters 
and society, the one of whom he spoke with the most un- 
varying regard. Carlyle corresponded with Peel, whom he 
set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of perfect 
trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom 
he miraculously credits with holding at heart views much 
like his own. At a somewhat later date, in the circle of 
his friends, bound to him by various degrees of intimacy, 
History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, and Froude ; 

listen to you. Brevity and sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, 
omit much, give each subject its proper proportionate space ; and be 
exact without caring to round off the edges of what you have to say." 
Later, he declines Bamford's offer of verses, saying " verse is a bug- 
bear to booksellers at present. These are prosaic, earnest, practical, 
not singing times." 



96 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough ; 
Social romance by Kingsley ; Biography by James Sped- 
ding and John Forster; and Criticism by John Buskin. 
His link to the last named was, however, their common dis- 
trust of political economy, as shown in Unto This Last, 
rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a 
conversationalist more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a 
rival rather than a companion ; but his prejudiced view of 
physical science was forgotten in his personal affection for 
Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was 
from the publication of Cromwell till near his death in- 
creasingly sought after by the aristocracy, several members 
of which invited him to their country-seats, and bestowed 
on him all acceptable favours. In this class he came to 
find other qualities than those referred to in the Sartor in- 
scription, and other aims than that of " preserving their 
game," the ambition to hold the helm of the State in 
stormy weather, and to play their part among the "captains 
of industry." In the Reminiscences the aristocracy are de- 
liberately voted to be " for continual grace of bearing and 
of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery stoi- 
cism, actually yet the best of English classes." There 
can be no doubt that his intercourse with this class, as 
with men of affairs and letters, some of whom were his 
proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel to the duck-pond 
of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border 
moors. 

Es bildet em Talent sich in der Stille, 
Sich em Character in dern Strom der Welt. 

The life of a great capital may be the crown of educa- 
tion, but there is a danger in homage that comes late and 
then without reserve. Give me neither poverty nor riches, 



v.] CHEYNE KOW. 97 

applies to praise as well as to wealth ; and the sudden tran- 
sition from comparative neglect to 

honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, 

is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of 
the "irritable race" of writers. The deference paid to 
Carlyle made him yet more intolerant of contradiction, and 
fostered his selfishness, in one instance with the disastrous 
result of clouding a whole decade of his domestic life. 
In February, 1839, he speaks of dining — "an eight-o'clock 
dinner which ruined me for a week " — with " a certain 
Baring," at whose table in Bath House he again met Bun- 
sen, and was introduced to Lord Mahon. This was the 
beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, grew into 
the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of 
Lord Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and 
successor to the title on his father's death in 1848, was a 
man of sterling worth and sound sense, who entered into 
many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general 
consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose 
grace, wit, refinement, and decision of character had made 
her the acknowledged leader of society. Lady Harriet, by 
the exercise of some overpowering though purely intellect- 
ual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern Diogenes, 
our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, 
whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her 
beck from town to country, from castle to cot; from Addis- 
combe, her husband's villa in Surrey, to the Grange, her 
father-in-law's seat in Hampshire ; from Loch Luichart and 
Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the 
Palais Royal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction 
to the Journal is substantially as follows : Lady Harriet 
Baring or Ashburton was the centre of a planetary system 

5 



98 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

in which every distinguished public man of genuine worth 
then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among 
them, and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself 
taking some part in public affairs, and saw the advantage of 
this stepping-stone to enable him to do something more for 
the world, as Byron said, than write books for it. But the 
idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once 
suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient 
to have ever influenced his conduct. It is more correct to 
say that he was flattered by a sympathy not too thorough 
to be tame, pleased by adulation never gross, charmed by 
the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally fascinated 
by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange 
alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne 
Row is no matter of surprise. Pride and affection together 
had made her bear with all her husband's humours, and 
share with him all the toils of the struggle from obscurity. 
He had emerged, and she was still half content to be sys- 
tematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on 
which he was building a fame she had some claim to share. 
But her fiery spirit was not yet tamed into submitting to 
be sacrificed to an animate rival, or passively permitting 
the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself by 
another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of 
despising. Lady Harriet's superiority in finesse and geni- 
ality, as well as advantages of station, were aggravations of 
the injury, and this with a singular want of tact Carlyle 
further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting 
the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against 
the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half con- 
scious antagonism between the chief female actors in the 
tragi-comedy ; the one sometimes innocently unobservant 
of the wants of her guest, the other turning every acciden- 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 99 

tal neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an 
affront. Carlyle's " Gloriana " was to the mind of his wife 
a " heathen goddess," while Mrs. Carlyle, with reference to 
her favourite dog " Nero," was in her turn nicknamed 
Agrippina. 

In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at 
Addiscombe in worse than her usual health, she returned 
to Chelsea with " her mind all churned to froth," opened it 
to her husband with such plainness that " there was a vio- 
lent scene ;" she left the house in a mood like that of the 
first Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the 
Paulets at Seaforth, near Liverpool, uncertain whether or 
not she would return. There were only two persons from 
whom it would seem natural for her at such a crisis to ask 
advice ; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester 
lady, authoress of a well-known novel, The Half- Sisters, 
from the beginning of their acquaintance in 1841 till the 
close in 1866 her most intimate associate and chosen con- 
fidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets; 1 the 
other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic mor- 
alist, Joseph Mazzini. To him she wrote twice — once ap- 
parently before leaving London, and again from Seaforth. 
His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and yet rigidly 
insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed 
to avert the threatened catastrophe ; but there are sentences 
which show how bitter the complaints must have been. 

It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the present 
may be, you must front it with dignity. ... I could only point out 
to you the fulfilment of duties which can make life — not happy — 

1 Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, 
as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appre- 
ciated her genuine worth. 



100 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

what can ? but earnest, sacred, and resigned. ... I am carrying a 
burden even heavier than you, and have undergone even bitterer de- 
ceptions. Your life proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do 
not blaspheme. Have you never done good ? Have you never 
loved? . . . Pain and joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the 
rain and the sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. 
Bless the Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to 
you. . , . Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do not 
think a single moment that the one or the other have anything to do 
with the end of the journey. 

Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of 
reproach and affection. " We never parted before in such 
a manner; and all for literally nothing. . . . Adieu, 
dearest, for that is, and, if madness prevail not, may for- 
ever be, your authentic title ;" and another, enclosing the 
birthday present which he had never omitted since her 
mother's death, softened his wife's resentment, and the 
storm blew over for a time. But while the cause re- 
mained there was in the house at best a surface tran- 
quillity, at worst an undertone of misery which finds voice 
in Mrs. Carlyle's diary from October, 1855, to May, 1856, 
not merely covered with " black spider webs," but steeped 
in gall, the publication of which has made so much de- 
bate. It is like a page from Othello reversed. A few 
sentences condense the refrain of the lament. " Charles 
Buller said of the Duchess de Praslin, ' What could a poor 
fellow do with a wife that kept a journal but murder 
her?' " "That eternal Bath House ! I wonder how many 
thousand miles Mr. C. has walked between here and 
there 2" " Being an only child, I never wished to sew 
men's trousers — no, never ! 

"I gin to think I've sold myself 
For very little cas." 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 101 

" To-day I called on my lady : she was perfectly civil, for 
a wonder." " Edward Irving ! The past is past and gone 
is gone — 

" waly, waly, love is bonnie, 
A little while when it is new." 

Quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's 
visit to the people at Haddington, " who seem all to grow 
so good and kind as they grow old," and to the graves in 
the church-yard there, are infinitely pathetic. The letters 
which follow are in the same strain, e.g. to Carlyle when 
visiting his sister at the Gill, " I never forget kindness, 
nor, alas, unkindness either :" to Luichart, " I don't be- 
lieve thee, wishing yourself at home. . . . You don't, as 
weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself for the pleas- 
ure of others ;" to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, " My Lon- 
don doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always 
happy and tranquil (! ! !) " 

In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real 
ground for offence in allowing both the Carlyles, on their 
way north with her, to take a seat in an ordinary railway 
carriage, beside her maid, while she herself travelled in a 
special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. Car- 
lyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and after- 
wards refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. 
This resulted in another quarrel with her husband, who 
had issued the command from Luichart — but it was their 
last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the 4th of the 
following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like 
woman I had ever known or seen, by nature and by cult- 
ure facile princeps she, I think, of all great ladies I have 
ever seen." This brought to a close an episode in which 
there were faults on both sides, gravely punished : the in- 



102 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

cidents of its course and the manner in which they were 
received show, among other things, that railing at the 
name of " Happiness " does little or nothing to reconcile 
people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord Ash- 
burton married again — a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who be- 
came the attached friends of the Carlyles, and remained on 
terms of unruffled intimacy with both till the end : she 
survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a legacy 
of £2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. Sic transit. 
From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty 
years to retrace the main steps of the great author's 
career. Much of the interval was devoted to innumerable 
visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in pay- 
ing his annual devotions to Annandalc — calls on his time 
which kept him rushing from place to place like a comet. 
Two facts are notable about those expeditions : they rarely 
seemed to give him much pleasure, even at Scotsbrig he 
complained of sleepless nights and farm noises ; and he 
was hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She, too, was 
constantly running north to her own kindred in Liverpool 
or Scotland, but their paths did not run parallel, they al- 
most always insected, so that when the one was on the 
way north the other was homeward bound, to look out 
alone on " a horizon of zero." Only a few of these visits 
are worth recording as of general interest. Most of them 
were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, Mar- 
garet Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, 
and recorded her impression of the master as "in a very 
sweet humour, full of wit and pathos, without being over- 
bearing," adding that she was "carried away by the rich 
flow of his discourse ;" and that " the hearty, noble ear- 
nestness of his personal bearing brought back the charm 
of his writing before she wearied of it." A later visitor, 



v# ] CIIEYNE ROW. 108 

Miss Mm'tincaii, lii» old liclpcr in days of struggle, was now 
ilms esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, a mind 
reduced to these three elements — imbecility, dogmatism} 
and unlimited hope. 1 never in my life was more heartily 
bored with any creature 1" In 1K17 there followed the 
last English glimpse of Jeffrey and the last of Dr. Chal- 
mers, who was full of enthusiasm about Cromwell ; then 
a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with 

the former he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics 
described as " shallow, totally worthless to me," the latter 
he liked, recognising in him n culture and delicacy rare 
with so much strength of will and independence of 
tllOUffht. Later came a second visit from Emerson, then 
on a lecturing tour to England, gathering impressions re- 
vived in his Engll8h '/'raits. " His doctrines an; too airy 
and thin," wrote (Jarlylc, "for the solid, practical heads of 
the Lancashire; region. We had immense talkings with 
him here, but found that lie did not give as much to chew 

the cud upon. I le is a pure-minded man, but I think his tal- 
ent is not quite so high as I had anticipated." They had an 
interesting walk to Btonehenge together, and ( 'arlyle attend- 
ed one of his friend's lectures, but with modified approval, 
finding this serene " spiritual son " of his own rather "gone 
into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of 
this date, on the other hand, mark his emancipation from 
mere discipleship. " (Jarlyle had all the kleinstiidtlichcr 

traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded 

with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a 
vast continent. ... In him, as in Ilyron, one is more struck 
with the rhetoric; than with the matter. . . There is more 
character than intellect in every sentence, therein strangely 
resembling Samuel .Johnson." The same year Carlyle per- 
petrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats : 



104 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force 
of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force. 
. . . Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, 
was a chosen " Vessel of Hell." 

And in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference 
to Macaulay's History : 

The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, within 
perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred editions could 
not add any value, there being no depth of sense in it at all, and a 
very great quantity of rhetorical wind. 

Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at 
Bath, he appreciated, being " much taken with the gigan- 
tesque, explosive but essentially chivalrous and almost 
heroic old man." 1 He was now at ease about the sale of 
his books, having, inter alia, received £600 for a new edi- 
tion of the French Revolution and the Miscellanies. His 
Journal is full of plans for new work on democracy, or- 
ganisation of labour, and education, and his letters of the 
period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely devoted 
to politics. 

In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ire- 
land, crossing from Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving 
to Drogheda, and by rail to Dublin, where in Conciliation 

1 This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led 
to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to 
Emerson, 1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as " a wild man, 
whom no extent of culture had been able to tame ! His intellectual 
faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of 
temper : the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be 
wrong than right— as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or 
the other of the object : and sides of an object are all that he sees." 
De te fabnla. Emerson answers defending Landor, and indicating 
points of likeness between him and Carlyle. 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 105 

Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time since a casual 
glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller — 
a meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. 
O'Connell was always an object of Carlyle's detestation, 
and on this occasion he does not mince his words. 

Chief quack of the then world . . . first time I had ever heard 
the lying scoundrel speak. . . . Demosthenes of blarney. . . . The 
big beggar-man who had £15,000 a year, and, proh pudorl the 
favour of English ministers instead of the pillory. 

At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, 
with Mitchell and Gavan Duffy, 1 the young Ireland leaders 
whom he seems personally to have liked, but he told 
Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said dur- 
ing a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the 
Pale, "Ah ! Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody 
Saxon." He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 
10th r and so closed his short and unsatisfactory trip. 
Three years later, July to August 6th, 1849, he paid a 
longer and final visit to the " ragged commonweal " or 
" common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, 
and after some days there passing on to Kildare, Kil- 
kenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful Killarney and its 

1 Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the " Conversations and Correspond- 
ence," now being published in the Contemporary Review, naturally 
emphasises Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several 
expressions of sympathy with the " Tenant Agitations ;" but his 
demur to the Reminiscences of My Irish Journey being accepted as 
an accurate account of the writer's real sentiments is of little avail 
in face of the letters to Emerson, more strongly accentuating the 
same view, e.g., " Bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash. 
. . . 'Blacklead these two million idle beggars,' I sometimes advised, 
'and sell them in Brazil as niggers !' — perhaps Parliament on sweet 
constraint will allow you to advance them to be niggers 1" 
5* 



106 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlcbar, 
where he met W. E. Foster, whose acquaintance he had 
made two years earlier at Matlock. At Gweedorc in 
Donegal he stayed with Lord George Hill, whom he re- 
spected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road 
to Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had 
never worked ; and then on to half Scotch Deny. There, 
August 6th, he made an emphatic after-breakfast speech 
to a half sympathetic audience ; the gist of it being that 
the remedy for Ireland was not " emancipation " or 
"liberty," but to "cease following the devil, as it had 
been doing for two centuries." The same afternoon he 
escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 
2 a.m. on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, 
set down on his return to Chelsea and republished in 
1882, having only the literary merit of the vigorous de- 
scriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest 
writing ; otherwise they are mere rough and tumble jot- 
tings, with no consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye 
view of the four provinces. 

But Carlyle never departed from the views they set 
forth, that Ireland is in the main a country of idle semi- 
savages, whose staple trade is begging, whose practice is 
to lie, unfit not only for self-government but for what is 
commonly called constitutional government, whose ragged 
people must be coerced, by the methods of Raleigh, of 
Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and 
respect for law. At Westport, where " human swinery has 
reached its acme," he finds " 30,000 paupers in a popula- 
tion of 00,000, and 34,000 kindred hulks on out-door relief, 
lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 
lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, " Can 
it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face 



v.] CIIKYNE ROW. 107 

of all the twaddle of tho earth, shoot, r man rather than 
train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a 
deceptive human twine*" Superficial travellers generally 
praise the Irish. Carlyla had not been long in their coun- 
try when he formulated l>is idea of the Home Rule that 
seemed to him most for their good* 

Kildare Railway: bi^ blockhead sitting with hll dirty feet on scat, 

oppoiite, not itlrrlng then for one who wanted to ait there. "One 
thing we're all agreed on," said he ; " we're rery Misgoverned \ Wh% 
Tory, Radical, Repealer, all, all admit, we're very Ill-governed I" I 
thought to myself , " Yes, Indeed ; you govern yourself! Ho that 
would govern you well would probably surprise you much, my friend 

— laying a hearty horsewhip over that back of yours." 

And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here 
-would have to eat, itself and end hy cannibalism in a week, 
if it wore not held ii|> hy the rest of our Empire standing 
afoot." These passages are written in tin; spirit which 

inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the 

an^n\ssive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what 

he regarded as the most prominent quackeries, shams, and 

pretence philanthropies of the day. His own account of 

the reception of this work is characteristic: 

iii 1849, after an Interval of deep and gloom and bottomless du» 
bitatlon came Latin- Dai) Pamphl6ia t which unpleasantly astonished 

everybody, set the world upon the Strangest SUppOSitiOUl — "(Jarlylc 
got deep into whisky," said Home — ruined my reputation according to 

the friendliest rolcei, and to effect divided me altogether from the mob 
of " Progress-of-the-gpecies' 1 and other- nilgar; but were a great relief 

to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have been ever since. 

These pamphlet! alienated Mazzini and Mill, and pro- 
voked the assault of tho newspapers ; which, hy the author's 



108 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

confession, did something to arrest and restrict the sale. 
Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his 
life, on occasion of his being called to serve at a jury trial, 
Carlyle, with remarkable adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant 
juryman into acquiescence with the majority ; but coaxing 
as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in 
front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was 
to fly in its face and tear it to pieces. His satire was not 
like that of Horace, who taught his readers ridendo dicere 
verum, it was rather that of the elder Lucilius or the later 
Juvenal ; not that of Chaucer, who wrote : 

That patience is a virtue high is plain, 
Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, 
Things that rude valour never could attain, 

but that of The Lye, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's Gul- 
liver, or the Letters of Junius. The method of direct de- 
nunciation has advantages : it cannot be mistaken, nor, if 
strong enough, ignored ; but it must lay its account with 
consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them so 
serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame 
with dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone 
back to the everlasting " No," and mistaken swearing all 
round for political philosophy. The ultimate value at- 
tached to the Latter -Day Pamphlets must depend to a 
large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, 
generally admitted on the one hand that they served in 
some degree to counteract the rashness of Philanthropy ; 
on the other, that their effect was marred by more than 
the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to 
refer the temper they display to the troubles then gather- 
ing about his domestic life. A better explanation is to 
be found in the public events of the time. 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 109 

The two years previous to their appearance were the 
Revolution years, during which the European world seemed 
to be turned upsidedown. The French had thrown out 
their bourgeois king, Louis Philippe — " the old scoundrel," 
as Carlyle called him — and established their second Re- 
public. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt 
against the old authorities ; the Irish joined in the chorus, 
and the Chartist monster petition was being carted to 
Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the day^ kings 
became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were 
being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the 
surface of an earthquake. They were years of great aspira- 
tions, with beliefs in all manner of swift regeneration : 

Magnus ab integro sseclorum nascitur ordo, 

all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at 
Rome, Kossuth at Pesth ; the riots of Berlin resulted in 
the restoration of the old dull bureaucratic regime ; Smith 
O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage garden ; the Rail- 
way Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, 
and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The 
old sham gods, with Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in 
front, came back ; because, concluded Carlyle, there was no 
man in the front of the new movement strong enough to 
guide it ; because its figure-heads were futile sentimental- 
ists, insurgents who could not win. The reaction pro- 
duced by their failure had somewhat the same effect on 
his mind that the older French Revolution had on that of 
Burke : he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. 
Froude allows on practical conservatism and on the nega- 
tions of which the Latter-Day Pamphlets are the expres- 
sion. To this series of pronunciamentos of political seep- 



110 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

ticism he meant to add another, of which he often talks 
under the name of " Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly 
stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete 
divergence from all forms of what either in England or 
Europe generally could be called the Orthodox faith in 
Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this by the 
feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and 
derided in Belgium or in Galway was better than the 
atheistic materialism which he associated with the domin- 
ion of mere physical science. He may have felt he had 
nothing, definite enough to be understood by the people, 
to substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he 
may have had a thought of the reception of such a work 
at Scotsbrig. Much of the Life of Sterling, however, is 
somewhat less directly occupied with the same question, 
and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much 
clamour as the Pamphlets, especially in the north. The 
book, says Carlyle himself, was " utterly revolting to the 
religious people in particular (to my surprise rather than 
otherwise). ' Doesn't believe in us either !' Not he for 
certain ; can't, if you will know." During the same year 
his almost morbid dislike of materialism found vent in 
denunciations of the " Crystal Palace " Exhibition of In- 
dustry ; though for its main promoter, Prince Albert, he 
subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. 

In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to 
Malvern, where they met Tennyson (whose good -nature 
had been proof against some slighting remarks on his 
verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his " Roman," 
and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," 
under the superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and 
treated them as guests ; but they derived little good from 
the process. " I found," says Carlyle, " water taken as 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. Ill 

medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever tried." 
Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his 
mother, then in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing 
feeble; a quiet time only disturbed by indignation at 
" one ass whom I heard the bray of in some Glasgow news- 
paper," comparing " our grand hater of shams," to Father 
Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend 
a few days with the Ashburtons at Paris on their return 
from Switzerland. Though bound by a promise to respond 
to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. Travelling 
abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated 
in this case by his very limited command of the language 
for conversational purposes. Fortunately, on reaching 
London he found that the poet Browning and his wife, 
whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, were 
about to start for the same destination, and he prevailed 
upon them, though somewhat reluctant, to take charge of 
him. 1 The companionship was, therefore, not accidental, 
and it was of great service. " Carlyle," according to Mrs. 
Browning's biographer, " would have been miserable with- 
out Browning, who made all the arrangements for the 
party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to pass- 
ports, fought the battles of all the stations, and afterwards 
acted as guide through the streets of the great city." By 
a curious irony, two verse-makers and admirers of George 
Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to 
find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, 
■wrote that she liked the prophet more than she expected, 
finding his " bitterness only melancholy, and his scorn 
sensibility." Browning himself continued through life to 
regard Carlyle with " affectionate reverence." " He never 

1 Mrs. Sutherland Orr's Life of Robert Browning. 



112 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

ceased," says Mrs. Orr, " to defend him against the charge 
of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that, in the matter 
of their domestic unhappiness, she was the more responsi- 
ble of the two. . . . He always thought her a hard, unlovable 
woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them. 
. . . Yet Carlyle never rendered him that service — easy as 
it appears — which one man of letters most justly values 
from another, that of proclaiming the admiration which 
he privately professed for his work." The party started 
September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after 
a rough passage, the effects of which on some fellow- 
travellers more unfortunate than himself Carlyle describes 
in a series of recently - discovered jottings 1 made on his 
return, October 2d, to Chelsea. On September 25th they 
reached Paris. Carlyle joined the Ashburtons at Meurice's 
Hotel : there dined, went in the evening to the Theatre 
FranQais, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on 
General Changarnier sitting in the stalls. 

During the next few days he met many of the celebri- 
ties of the time, and caricatured, after his fashion, their 
personal appearance, talk, and manner. These criticisms 
are for the most part of little value. The writer had in 
some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of un- 
derstanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was 
compatible with his Puritan vein ; but as regards French 
literature since the Revolution he was either ignorant or 
alien. What light could be thrown on that interesting era 
by a man who could only say of the authors of La Corne- 
die Humaine and Consuelo that they were ministers in a 
Phallus worship ? Carlyle seems to have seen most of 

1 Partially reproduced, Pall Mall Gazette, April 9th, 1890, with il- 
lustrative connecting comments. 



v.J CHEYNE ROW. 113 

Thiers, whom he treats with good-natured condescension, 
but little insight : " round fat body, tapering like a nine- 
pin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered 
eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has 
absolutely no malignity towards any one, and is not the 
least troubled with self-seekings." Thiers talked with con- 
tempt of Michelet, and Carlyle, unconscious of the numer- 
ous affinities between that historian of genius and himself, 
half assented. Prosper Merimee, 1 on the other hand, in- 
censed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badi- 
nage or earnest — probably the former. "Jean Paul," he 
said, getting on the theme of German literature, " was a 
hollow fool of the first magnitude," and Goethe was " in- 
significant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe manque." 
" I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar and ad- 
journed to the street. 'You impertinent, blasphemous 
blockhead !' this was sticking in my throat ; better to re- 
tire without bringing it out." Of Guizot he writes, " Tar- 
tuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting ' No ' with 
a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting 
' Yea.' " " To me an extremely detestable kind of man." 
Carlyle missed General Cavaignac, " of all Frenchmen the 
one " he " cared to see." In the streets of Paris he found 
no one who could properly be called a gentleman. " The 
truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (i.e. 
among the industrial classes) making money, while the 
politician, literary, etc., etc. class is mere play-actorism." 
His summary before leaving at the close of a week, rather 
misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether 



1 The two men were mutually antagonistic ; Merimee tried to read 
the French Revolution, but flung the book aside in weariness or dis- 
dain. 



114 THOMAS CAELYLE. [chap. 

without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased 
mood ; but I saw traces of the inarticulate . . . much 
worthier." 

Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange 
(distinguishing himself, in an interval of study at home, 
by washing the back area flags with his own hands), and 
there joined her till the close of the year. During the 
early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and 
planning work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to 
Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, during which he had only 
to complain that the servants were often obliged to run 
out of the room to hide their laughter at his humorous 
bursts. At the close of August, 1852, he embarked on 
board a Leith steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first 
trip to Germany. Home once more, in October, he found 
chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming everything; 
" went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from 
Bath House the funeral, November 18th, of the great 
Duke," remarking, "The one true man of official men in 
England, or that I know of in Europe, concludes his long 
course. . . . Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone 
is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at 
the Grange, he met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when 
this statesman disparaged Mazzini — a thing only permitted 
by Carlyle to himself — he retorted with the remark, " Mon- 
sieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At 
Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a 
crisis, "the unprotected male" declaring that he would 
shoot them or poison them. " A man is not a Chatham 
nor a Wallenstein ; but a man has work, too, which the 
Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two 
and sixpence worth of bantams. . . . They must either with- 
draw or die." Ultimately his mother- wife came to the 



v.] CHEYNE ROW. 115 

rescue of her " babe of genius ;" the cocks were bought 
off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last 
considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. 
Meanwhile " brother John " had married, and Mrs. Carlyle 
went to visit the couple at Moffat. While there bad 
tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully hurried off 
to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which 
the strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final 
stroke could not be long delayed. When Carlyle was pay- 
ing his winter visit to the Grange in December, news came 
that his mother was worse, and her recovery despaired of; 
and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to Scotsbrig ; 
" mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful en- 
couragement to be speedy, not dilatory," and arrived in 
time to hear her last words. " Here is Tom come to bid 
you good-night, mother," said John. " As I turned to go, 
she said, * I'm muckle obleeged to you.' " She spoke no 
more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of 
death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. " We can only 
have one mother," exclaimed Byron on a like event — the 
solemn close of many storms. But between Margaret Car- 
lyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had 
never been a shadow. " If," writes Mr. Froude, " she 
gloried in his fame and greatness, he gloried more in being 
her son, and while she lived she, and she only, stood be- 
tween him and the loneliness of which he so often and so 
passionately complained." 

Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful 
than those which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written 
on his fifty -eighth birthday, December 4th, which she 
probably never read, is one of the finest. The close of 
their wayfaring together left him solitary ; his " soul all 
hung with black," and, for months to come, everything 



116 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. v. 

around was overshadowed by the thought of his bereave- 
ment. In his journal of February 28th, 1854, he tells us 
that he had on the Sunday before seen a vision of Mainhill 
in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting 
dressed for the meeting-house. " They are gone now, 
vanished all ; their poor bits of thrifty clothes, . . . their 
pious struggling efforts ; their little life, it is all away. It 
has all melted into the still sea, it was rounded with a 
sleep." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer : " O pious 
mother ! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever 
found, and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. 
Your poor Tom, long out of his school-days now, has fallen 
very lonely, very lame and broken in this pilgrimage of 
his; and you cannot help him or cheer him . . . any more. 
From your grave in Ecclefechan kirk-yard yonder you bid 
him trust in God ; and that also he will try if he can un- 
derstand and do." 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE MINOTAUR. 
[1853-1866.] 

Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, re- 
ceived, and wellnigh exhausted all his strength, resulting in 
the greatest though the least generally read of all his books. 
Cromwell achieved, he had thrown himself for a season into 
contemporary politics, condescending even, contrary to his 
rule, to make casual contributions to the Press ; but his 
temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters 
of the time are full of the feeling that the Latter -Day 
Pamphlets had set the world against him. None of his 
generous replies to young men asking his advice are more 
suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea 
(March 9th, 1850): 

If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least whether 
other people believe it or not ; but lay it to heart ... as a real mes- 
sage left with you, which you must set about fulfilling, whatever 
others do. . . . And be not surprised that " people have no sympathy 
with you." That is an accompaniment that will attend you all your 
days if you mean to live an earnest life. 

But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even 
for him, it was not good to be alone. He decided there 
" was no use railing in vain like Timon ;" he would go back 



118 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

again from the present to the past, from the latter days of 
discord to seek countenance in some great figure of histo- 
ry, under whose aegis he might shelter the advocacy of his 
views. Looking about for a theme, several crossed his 
mind. He thought of Ireland, but that was too burning a 
subject ; of William the Conqueror, of Simon de Montfort, 
the Norsemen, the Cid ; but these may have seemed to him 
too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take 
up his and their favourite Knox. But Knox's life had 
been fairly handled by M'Crie, and Carlyle would have 
found it hard to adjust his treatment of that essentially 
national " hero " to the " Exodus from Houndsditch." 
"Luther" might have been an apter theme; but there 
too it would have been a strain to steer clear of theoloari- 
cal controversy, of which he had had enough. Napoleon 
was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking 
over Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the 
Prussian monarchy had been the main centre of modern 
stability, and that it had been made so by its virtual crea- 
tor, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, the 
subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, 
and, in spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, 
so that he could "not choose but" write on it. Again and 
again, as the magnitude of the task became manifest, we 
find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, and yet cap- 
tive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own 
Memoirs and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains 
through which he had to dig. "Prussian Friedrich and 
the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust lay crush- 
ing me with the continual question, Dare I try it ? Dare 
I not ?" At length, gathering himself together for the ef- 
fort, he resolved, as before in the case of Cromwell, to visit 
the scenes of which he was to write. Hence the excursion 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 119 

to Germany of 1852, during which, with the kindly-offered 
guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German ad- 
mirer of some fortune resident in London, he made his 
first direct acquaintance with the country of whose litera- 
ture he had long been himself the English interpreter. 
The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from 
the letters written during its progress to his wife and moth- 
er. Reaching Rotterdam on September 1st, after a night 
made sleepless by " noisy nocturnal travellers and the most 
industrious cocks and clamorous bells " he had ever heard, 
he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted books, 
saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the 
German professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statis- 
tics." There he met Neuberg, and they went together tp 
Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef among the Sieben- 
Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, 
which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared 
to Matlock, and making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the 
birthplace of William the Silent, they rejoined the Rhine 
and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the river. 
From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to 
Frankfort, paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the 
garret where Werther was written, the Judengasse, " grim- 
mest section of the Middle Ages," and the Romer — elec- 
tion hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where 
they saw an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of 
gold pieces every stake," and left after no long stay, Car- 
lyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, pronouncing the fashionable 
Badeort to be the " rallying-place of such a set of empty 
blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." 
We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle 
of Philip of Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to 
Eisenach, and visited the neighbouring Wartburg, where 



120 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

he kissed the old oaken table on which the Bible was 
made an open book for the German race, and noted the 
hole in the plaster where the ink-stand had been thrown 
at the devil and his noises : an incident to which eloquent 
reference is made in the lectures on " Heroes." Hence 
they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room after 
Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, 
they took rail to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe 
and of Schiller, and dined by invitation with the Augusten- 
burgs ; the Grand Duchess, with sons and daughters, con- 
versing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, Eng- 
lish, and German. The next stage seems to have been 
Leipzig, then in a bustle with the Fair. " However," says 
Carlyle, " we got a book or two, drank a glass of wine in 
Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to the compara- 
tive quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture-galleries ; 
and makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they 
steamed up the Elbe to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. 
There he surveyed Lobositz, first battle-field of the Seven 
Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain watering- 
place of Toplitz. " He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be 
getting very successfully through his travels, thanks to the 
patience and helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every 
letter frightful misereres over his sleeping accommodations; 
but he cannot conceal that he is really pretty well." The 
writer's own misereres are as doleful and nearly as fre- 
quent ; but she was really in much worse health. From 
Toplitz the companions proceeded in weary stillwagens to 
Zittau in Lusatia, and so on to 

Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren ; a place not 
bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet beyond any town 
on the earth, I dare say ; and, indeed, more like a saintly dream of 
ideal Calvinism made real than a town of stone and lime. 



VI J THE MINOTAUR. m 

Onward by "dreary, moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, 
whence they reconnoitred " the field of Kunersdorf, a 
scraggy village where Fritz received his worst defeat," they 
reached the Prussian capital on the last evening 'of the 
month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we 
have, October 1st: 

I am dead stupid ; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my head 
churned to pieces. . . . Berlin is loud almost as London, but in no oth- 
er way great . . . about the size of Liverpool, and more like Glasgow. 

They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier 
by an introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambas- 
sador), discovering at length an excellent portrait of Fritz, 
meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, Preuss, etc., and then got 
quickly back to London by way of Hanover, Cologne, and 
Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would 
be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, 
complaints. Six years later (1858) he made his second ex- 
pedition to Germany, in the company of two friends, a 
Mr. Foxton— who is made a butt— and the faithful Neu- 
berg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusive- 
ly business purpose, and accomplished with greater dis- 
patch, there are fewer notes, the substance of which may 
be here anticipated. He sailed (August 21st) from Leith 
to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out 
of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron 
Usedom and his wife to the Isle of Riigen, sometimes called 
the German Isle of Wight. He went there by Stralsund, 
liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where for cocks 
crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Rich- 
mond of the island, he had to encounter brood sows as 
well as cochin-chinas. From Riigen he went quickly south 
by Stettin to Berlin, then to Custrin to survey the field of 



122 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of Friedrich 
know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for ex- 
ploring the grounds of " Leuthen, the grandest of all the 
battles," and Molvvitz — first of Fritz's fights — of which we 
hear so much in the Reminiscences. His course lay on to 
Breslau, " a queer old city as ever you heard of, high as 
Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through the 
picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. 
There he first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for 
bed a " trough eighteen inches too short, a mattress forced 
into it which cocked up at both ends" — such as most trav- 
ellers in remoter Germany at that period have experienced. 
Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; 
and " not one in a hundred of them could understand a 
word of German. They are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind 
of miserable, subter-Irish people — Irish with the addition 
of ill-nature." He and his friends visited the fields of 
Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden Sun," 
from which " the last of the Kings " had surveyed the 
ground, " sunk to be the dirtiest house probably in Eu- 
rope." Thence he made for Prague, whose picturesque 
grandeur he could not help extolling. " Here," he writes, 
enclosing the flower to his wife, " is an authentic wild pink 
plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady 
who practises the Battle of Prague on her piano to your 
satisfaction." On September loth he dates from Dresden, 
whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. Thereafter 
they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, 
Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, 
they were obliged to decline another invitation from the 
Duchess at Weimar ; and, making for Guntershausen, per- 
formed the fatiguing journey from there to Aix-la-Chapelle 
in one day, i.e. travelling often in slow trains from 4 a.m. 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 



123 



to 7 p.m., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle vis- 
ited the cathedra], but has left a very poor account of the 
impression produced on him by the simple slab sufficiently 
inscribed " Carolo Magno." " Next morning stand upon the 
lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring out their 
idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and 
Dover he reached home on the 22d. A Yankee scamper 
trip, one might say, but for the result testifying to the 
enormous energy of the traveller. " He speaks lightly," 
says Mr. Froude, " of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc., etc. 
No one would guess from reading these short notices that 
he had mastered the details of every field he visited ; not 
a turn of the ground, not a brook, not a wood . . . had 
escaped him There are no mistakes. Military stu- 
dents in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in 
Carlyle's account of them." 

During the interval between those tours there are few 
events of interest in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner, 
life which have not been already noted. The year 1854 
found the country ablaze with the excitement of the Crim- 
ean War, with which he had as little sympathy as Cob- 
den or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He 
had no share in the popular enthusiasm for what he re- 
garded as a mere newspaper folly. All his political lean- 
ing was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe distance, 
having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always 
admired as a seat of strong government, the representative 
of wise control over barbarous races. Among the worst of 
these he reckoned the Turk, " a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark 
fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 years. I would 
not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of 
sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the 
"Balance of power" than had Byron, who scoffed at it 



124 THOMAS CAKLYLE. [chap. 

from another, the Republican, side as " balancing straws 
on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," e.g. : 

As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait till 
Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his increase of 
strength. It is the idle population of editors, etc., that has done all 
this in England. One perceives clearly that ministers go forward in 
it against their will. 

Even our heroisms at Alma — "a terrible, almost horri- 
ble operation " — Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise 
a glow in his mind, though he admitted the force of Ten- 
nyson's ringing lines. The alliance with the "scandalous 
copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews chose 
Barabbas — an alliance at which many patriots winced — was 
to him only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the 
subsequent visit to Osborne of Victor Hugo's " brigand," 
and his reception within the pale of legitimate sovereignty 
was, " Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. That 
is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men 
round to his mind about Napoleon III. : but his approval 
of the policy of the Czars remains open to the criticism 
of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great struggle of 
the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his 
countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy re- 
bellion as were those who blew the ringleaders from the 
muzzles of guns. " Tongue cannot speak," he exclaims, 
in the spirit that inspired Millais's picture, before it was 
amended or spoilt, " the horrors that were done on the 
English by these mutinous hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to 
mutiny and strange things will follow." He never seems 
to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired 
Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of 
the north he had ready apologies, for the savagery of the 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 125 

south mere execration ; and he writes of the Hindoos as 
he did, both before and afterwards, of the negroes in Ja- 
maica. 

Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period ex- 
pressed his softer side. In April, 1854, John Wilson and 
Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His estimate of the 
former is notable as that generally entertained, now that 
the race of those who came under the personal spell of 
Christopher North has passed : 

We lived apart as in different centuries ; though to say the truth 
I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, and many 
traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam seemed always want- 
ing ; very long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable contra- 
dictions — Toryism with Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total 
incredulity, etc. . . . Wilson seemed to me always by far the most 
gifted of our literary men, either then or still : and yet intrinsically 
he has written nothing that can endure. 

Cockburn is referred to in contrast as " perhaps the last 
genuinely national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, 
and humour — a wholesome product of Scotch dialect, with 
plenty of good logic in it." Later Douglas Jerrold is 
described as " last of the London wits, I hope the last." 
Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest : 
many refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and hum- 
ble relatives, with the usual complaints about health, serv- 
ants, and noises. At Farlingay, where he spent some time 
with Edward Fitzgerald, translator of Omar Khayam, the 
lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here 
and there occurs a criticism or a speculation. That on his 
dreams is, in the days of " insomnia," perhaps worth not- 
ing (F. iv. 154, 155), inter alia he says: "I have an im- 
pression that one always dreams, but that only in cases 



126 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which pro- 
duces light, imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as 
to force themselves on our waking consciousness." Among 
posthumously printed documents of Cheyne Row, to this 
date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a 
larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a 
Femme Incomprise." The arguments and statement of ac- 
counts, worthy of a bank auditor, were so irresistible that 
Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, i.e. prac- 
tically to raise the amount to £230, instead £200 per an- 
num. It has been calculated that his reliable income even 
at this time did not exceed £400, but the rent of the 
house was kept very low, £30 : he and his wife lived 
frugally, so that despite the expenses of the noise -proof 
room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to 
put a stop to her travelling in second-class railway car- 
riages; in 1860, when the success of the first instalment 
of his great work made an end of financial fears, to keep 
two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle a brough- 
am. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a 
record in money matters. 

In November, 1854, there occurred an incident hitherto 
unrecorded in any biography. The Lord Rectorship of 
the University of Glasgow having fallen vacant, the " Con- 
servative Club " of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli 
as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. 
Carlyle's admirers among the senior students, on the other 
side, nominated him, partly as a tribute of respect and 
gratitude, partly in opposition to a statesman whom they 
then distrusted. The nomination was, after much debate, 
adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that 
day ; and, with a curious irony, the author of the Latter- 
Day Pamphlets and Friedrich II. was pitted, as a Radi- 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 127 

cal, against the future promoter of the Franchise of 1867 
as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters had un- 
derestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offend- 
ed Scotch theological prejudice and outraged the current 
Philanthropy. His name received some sixty adherents, 
and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The nomination 
was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular 
opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest 
from the leaders of orthodox dissent, then arroo-atino; to 
themselves the profession of Liberalism and the initiation 
of Reform. Among the current expressions in reference 
to his social and religious creeds were the following : 

Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for na- 
tional distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden 
boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as 
reiterating the doctrine that " whatever is is wrong." He has thrown 
off every form of religious belief and settled down into the convic- 
tion that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham. . . . 
Elect him and you bid God -speed to Pantheism and spiritualism. 1 
Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor does 
he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour as the 
Rectorial Chair. The Scotch Guardian writes : But for the folly ex- 
hibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any party within 
the College or out of it would have ventured to nominate a still more 
obnoxious personage. This is the first instance we have been able 
to discover in which the suffrages of the youth of the University have 
been sought for a candidate who denied in his writings that the re- 
vealed Word of God is " the way, the truth, the life." It is impossi- 
ble to separate Mr. Carlyle from that obtrusive feature of his works 



1 Mr. Wylie states that " twice before his election by his own Uni- 
versity he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to be nominat- 
ed for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in the University 
of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen ; but both of these invita- 
tions he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is incorrect. 



128 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

in which the solemn verities of our holy religion are sneered at as 
worn-out " bibliealities," " unbelievabilities," and religious profession 
is denounced as " dead putrescent cant." The reader of the Life of 
Sterling is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant 
hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith is 
described as " stealing into heaven by the modern method of stick- 
ing ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is to say, by 
believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after this, could the 
Principal and Professors of the University, the guardians of the 
faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, accompany to the Com- 
mon Hall, and allow to address the students a man who has degraded 
his powers to the life-labour of sapping and mining the foundations 
of the truth, and opened the fire of his fiendish raillery against the 
citadel of our best aspirations and dearest hopes. 

In the result, two men of genius 1 — however diverse — 
were discarded, and a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous tal- 
ent, always an active, if not intrusive, champion of or- 
thodoxy, was returned by an " overwhelming majority." 
In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of 
these events, the president of the Association of his sup- 
porters — who had nothing on which to congratulate them- 
selves save that only the benches of the rooms in which 
they held their meetings had been riotously broken, re- 
ceived the following previously unpublished letter: 

Chelsea, 16th December, 1854. 

Dear Sir, — I have received your Pamphlet; and return many 
thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as I do for 
the first time from this narrative, what angry nonsense some of my 
countrymen see good to write of me. Not being much a reader of 
Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the Election till after it was fin- 
ished ; and I did not know that anything of this melancholy element 

1 For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle 
and Lord Beaconsfield, vide Mr. Froude's Life of the latter. 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 129 

of Heterodoxy, "Pantheism," etc., etc., had been introduced into the 
matter. It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and de- 
nounced by fools and ignorant persons ; but it cannot be mended for 
the present, and so must be left standing there. 

That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they alone 
have any real knowledge of the question, or any real right to vote 
upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. If that be so, then all 
is still right ; and probably there is no harm done at all ! — To you, 
and the other young gentlemen who have gone with you on this oc- 
casion, I can only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a 
great honour and kindness ; that I am deeply sensible of your genial 
recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds me of my own 
young years) ; and that in fine there is no loss or gain of an Elec- 
tion which can in the least alter these valuable facts, or which is not 
wholly insignificant to me in comparison with them. "Elections" 
are not a thing transacted by the gods, in general ; and I have known 
very unbeautiful creatures " elected " to be kings, chief-priests, rail- 
way kings, etc., by the " most sweet voices," and the spiritual virtue 
that inspires these, in our time ! 

Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your honourable good 
feelings towards me ; and to think that if anything I have done or 
written can help any one of you in the noble problem of living like a 
wise man in these evil and foolish times, it will be more valuable 
to me than never so many Elections or Non-elections. 

With many good wishes and regards I heartily thank you all, and 
remain, Yours very sincerely, 

T. Carltle. 

Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they 
are terse and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bam- 
ford ; to men in trouble, as Cooper ; to students, states- 
men, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, a genuine 
sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for 
himself, often too prominent in the copious effusions to his 
intimates. The letter above quoted is of special interest, as 
belonging to a time from which comparatively few survive ; 
when he was fairly under weigh with a task which seemed 
6* 



130 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The Life of Fried- 
rich could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the 
French Revolution, nor a biography like Cromwell, illus- 
trated by the surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle 
found, to his dismay, that he had involved himself in writ- 
ing the History of Germany, and in a measure of Europe, 
during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most 
tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's an- 
nals. He was like a man who, with intent to dig up a 
pine, found himself tugging at the roots of an Igdrasil 
that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian forest. 
His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the 
work are distressing, as his indomitable determination to 
wrestle with and prevail over it is inspiring. There is no 
imaginable image that he does not press into his service in 
rattling the chains of his voluntary servitude. Above all, 
he groans over the unwieldy mass of his authorities — 
"anti-solar systems of chaff." 

I read old German books dull as stupidity itself — nay, super- 
annuated stupidity — gain with labour the dreariest glimpses of un- 
important extinct human beings. . . . but when I begin operating : 
how to reduce that widespread black desert of Brandenburg sand to 
a small human garden ! . . . I have no capacity of grasping the 
big chaos that lies around me, and reducing it to order. Order ! 
Reducing ! It is like compelling the grave to give up its dead ! 

Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of 
his own creation to " Balder' s ride to the death kingdoms, 
through frozen rain, sound of subterranean torrents, leaden- 
coloured air ;" and in the retrospect of the Reminiscences 
touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely relieved 
isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my 
whole strength devoted to it . . . withdrawn from all the 



v*.] THE MINOTAUR. 



131 



world." He received few visitors and had few correspond- 
ents, but kept his life vigorous by riding on his horse 
Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), " during that book, some 
30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under 
cloud of night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the 
rest of the day I sat, silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and 
such work, invitissimd Minerva, for that matter." Mrs. Car- 
lyle 1 had her usual share of the sufferings involved in " the 
awful Friedrich." " That tremendous book," she writes, 
" made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory 
semblance of home life or home happiness." But when 
at last, by help of Neuberg and of Mr. Larkin, who made 
the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes were in 
type (they appeared in autumn, 1858), his wife hailed 
them in a letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, 
my dear, what a magnificent book this is going to be, 
the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and sparkling as 
the French Revolution ; compact and finished as Cromwell. 
Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, 
and small thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which 
the author naively purrs : " It would be worth while to 
write books, if mankind would read them as you." Later 
he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson 
— who wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, 
though much of it was across his grain — as " the only bit 

1 Carlyle himself writes : " I felt well enough how it was crush- 
ing down her existence, as it was crushing down my own ; and the 
thought that she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must 
suffer so for it, was occasionally bitter to me. But the practical con- 
clusion always was, Get done with it, get done with it ! For the sav- 
ing of us both that is the one outlook. And sure enough, I did stand 
by that dismal task with all my time and all my means ; day and night 
wrestling with it, as with the ugliest dragon, which blotted out the 
daylight and the rest of the world to me till I should get it slain." 



132 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

of human criticism in which he could discern lineaments 
of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two 
editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in 
a comparatively brief space. Carlyle's references to this — 
after his return from another visit to the north and the 
second trip to Germany — seem somewhat ungracious: 

Book . . . much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to 
me than the barking of dogs . . . officious people put reviews into 
my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into these ; but it 
would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant and impertinent 
were they, though generally laudatory. 

But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, 
that while the assailants of a book sometimes read it, 
favourable reviewers hardly ever do ; these latter save their 
time by payment of generally superficial praise, and a few 
random quotations. 

Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being dis- 
charged of the first instalment of his book: the remainder 
lay upon him like a menacing nightmare ; he never ceased 
to feel that the work must be completed ere he could be 
free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never 
absent from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite 
messages, and childlike entreaties for her to " come and 
protect him," when she came it was to find that they 
were better apart ; for his temper was never softened by 
success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the 
life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief resi- 
dence together in a hired house near Aberdour in Fife- 
shire, she compares herself to a keeper in a mad-house ; and 
writes later from Sunnybank to her husband, " If you 
could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my 
absence would make little difference to you, considering 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 133 

how little I do see of you, and how preoccupied you are 
when I do see you." Carlyle answers in his touching 
strain, " We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much 
bad road. Oh, forgive me !" and sends her beautiful de- 
scriptions; but her disposition, not wholly forgiving, re- 
ceived them somewhat sceptically. " Byron," said Lady 
Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it;" and 
Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her " harsh spouse " that 
his fine passages were very well written for the sake of 
future biographers : a charge he almost indignantly repu- 
diates. He was then, August, 1860, staying at Thurso 
Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair ; a visit that termi- 
nated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden 
change of plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stan- 
leys at Alderley, being driven back to Chelsea and de- 
prived of her promised pleasure and requisite rest with 
her friends in the north. 

The frequency of such incidents — each apart capable of 
being palliated by the same fallacy of division that has at- 
tempted in vain to justify the domestic career of Henry 
VIII. — points to the conclusion of Miss Gully that Carlyle, 
though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as if 
he were " totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so 
that she received medical advice not to be much at home 
when he was in the stress of writing. In January, 1858, 
he writes to his brother John an anxious letter in reference 
to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of which 
she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of 
the disease which ultimately proved fatal ; but he was not 
sufficiently impressed to give due heed to the warning ; 
nor was it possible, with his long^'engrained habits, to 
remove the Marah spring that lay under all the wearisome 
bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The 



134 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

" very little herring " who declined to be made a part of 
Lady Ashburton's luggage now suffered more than ever 
from her inanimate rival. The highly-endowed wife of 
one of the most eminent philanthropists of America, whose 
life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, 
thirty-five years ago murmured, " If I were only an idiot I" 
Similarly Mrs. Carlyle might have remonstrated, " Why 
was I not born a book ?" Her letters and journal teem to 
tiresomeness with the refrain, " I feel myself extremely 
neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable 
ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personal- 
ity overshadowed by a man she was afraid to meet at break- 
fast, and glad to avoid at dinner. A woman of immense tal- 
ent and a spark of genius linked to a man of vast genius and 
imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his judgments, 
intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. 
Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun 
to see the sun, and inconsistently defends many of the in- 
consistencies he has himself inherited from his master, yet 
admits that Carlyle treated the Broad Church party in the 
English Church with some injustice. His recorded esti- 
mates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal 
relation to them, are hopelessly bewildering. His long life 
friendship for Erskine of Linlathen is intelligible, though 
he did not extend the same charity to what he regarded as 
the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual in- 
spirer), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet 
entitled " Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and 
Reviewers, " Septem contra Christum," " should," he said, 
" be shot for deserting their posts ;" even Dean Stanley 
their amicus curice, whom he liked, came in for a share of 
his sarcasm ; " there he goes," he said to Froude, " bor- 
ing holes in the bottom of the Church of England." Of 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 135 

Colenso, who was doing as much as any one for the 
" Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open con- 
tempt, saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory 
that he is standing on ;" and was echoed by his wife, 
" Colenso isn't worth talking about for five minutes, except 
for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical onslaughts 
on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron 
on." This is not the place to discuss the controversy in- 
volved ; but we are bound to note the fact that Carlyle 
was, by an inverted Scotch intolerance, led to revile men 
rowing in the same boat as himself, but with a different 
stroke. To another Broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, 
partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, 
he was more considerate; and one of the still deeply re- 
ligious freethinkers of the time was among his closest 
friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 left an- 
other blank in Carlyle's life : we have had in this century 
to lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer 
genius. Clough had not, perhaps, the practical force of 
Sterling, but his work is of a higher order than any of the 
fragments of the earlier favourite. Among High Church- 
men Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judi- 
cious," and fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford ; but he 
called Keble "an ape," and said of Cardinal Newman that 
he had " no more brains that an ordinary-sized rabbit." 

These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring 
political blunder. The Civil War, then raging in America, 
brought, with its close, the abolition of Slavery throughout 
the States, a consummation for which he cared little, for 
he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for 
freedom ; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. 
As is known to every one who has the remotest knowledge 
of Transatlantic history, the war was in a great measure a 



136 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

struggle for the preservation of National Unity : but it was 
essentially more ; it was the vindication of Law and Order 
against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, 
when defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie- 
knife ; an assertion of Right as Might, for which Carlyle 
cared everything; yet all he had to say of it was his 
"Ilias Americana in nuce," published in Macmillan's 
Magazine, August, 1863. 

Peter of the North (to Paul of the South) : " Paul, you un- 
accountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not 
by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to Hell, 
you — " 

Paul: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am willing 
to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the month or the 
day, and get straight to Heaven ; leave me to my own method." 

Peter : " No, I won't. I will beat your brains out first !" [And 
is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet manage it.] 

This, except the Prinzenraub, a dramatic presentation 
of a dramatic incident in old German history, was his only 
side publication during the writing of Friedrich. 

After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remon- 
strance had proved prophetic, Carlyle is said to have con- 
fessed to Mr. Moncure Conway, as well as to Mr. Froude, 
that he " had not seen to the bottom of the matter." But 
his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an of- 
fence, emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is 
not always a safe guide, even to those content to abide by 
his own criterion of success. 

There remains of this period the record of a triumph 
and of a tragedy. After seven years more of rarely inter- 
mitted toil, broken only by a few visits, trips to the sea- 
shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible accident to his 
wife — her fall on a curb-stone and dislocation of a limb — 



vi.J THE MINOTAUR. 



137 



which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished 
his last great work. The third volume of Friedrich was 
published in May, 1862, the fourth appeared in February, 
1864, the fifth and sixth in March, 1865. Carlyle had at 
last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the world as a 
victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his 
hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. 
His position as the foremost prose writer of his day was as 
firmly established in Germany, where his book was at once 
translated and read by all readers of history, as in England. 
Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, made 
haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, 
bond and "free," who had denounced him, were now 
eager to proclaim that he had been intrinsically all along, 
though sometimes in disguise, a champion of their faith. 
No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to 
lead, what they had failed to quell. The Universities 
made haste with their burnt-offerings. J n 1856 a body 
of Edinburgh students had prematurely repeated the at- 
tempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him 
their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elect- 
ed, in opposition again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. 
Gladstone, the genius of elections being in a jesting mood. 
He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, later, con- 
sented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary In- 
augural Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion 
as to his success and his health is a tribute to her constant 
and intense fidelity. He went north to his Installation, 
under the kind care of encouraging friends, imprimis of 
Professor Tyndall, 1 one of his truest; they stopped on the 

1 For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and characteristic 
account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of the inci- 



138 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

road at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Pro- 
fessor Huxley, who accompanied them to Edinburgh. 
Oarlyle, having resolved to speak and not merely to read 
what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness ; and 
of the event itself he writes : " My speech was delivered 
in a mood of defiant despair, and under the pressure of 
nightmare. Some feeling that I was not speaking lies 
alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty 
noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, 
nominally on the " Reading of Books," really a rapid auto- 
biography of his own intellectual career, with references 
to history, literature, religion, and the conduct of life, was, 
as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle — save for some 
difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible — "a 
perfect triumph." His reception by one of the most en- 
thusiastic audiences ever similarly assembled marked the 
climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be compared 
to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford 
Theatre. After four days spent with Erskine and his 
own brother James in Edinburgh, he went for a week's 
quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering longer 
than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, " blessed in 
the country stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the 
absence of all babble." On April 20th he wrote his last 
letter to his wife, a letter which she never read. On the 
evening of Saturday, the 21st, when staying on the way 
south at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a tele- 
gram informing him that the companionship of more than 
forty years — companionship of struggle and victory, of sad 
and sweet so strangely blent — was forever at an end. 

dents which followed, we may refer to New Fragments, by John 
Tyndall, just published. 



vi.] THE MINOTAUR. 139 

Mrs. Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when 
driving round Hyde Park on the afternoon of that day, 
her death (from heart disease) being accelerated by an ac- 
cident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as " one who 
hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. " They 
took me out next day ... to wander in the green sunny 
Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose from my sick 
heart the ejaculation, £ My poor little woman !' but no fall 
gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On 
the following Monday he set off with bis brother for Lon- 
don. " Never for a thousand years shall I forget that ar- 
rival here of ours, my first unwelcomed by her. She lay 
in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death and things not 
mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On 
Wednesday they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she 
was buried in the nave of the old Abbey Kirk at Hadding- 
ton, in the grave of her father. The now desolate old 
man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, 
paid the first of his many regretful tributes in the epitaph 
inscribed over her tomb : in which follows, after the name 
and date of birth : 

In her bright existence she had more sorrows than are com- 
mon, BUT ALSO A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OP DISCERNMENT, AND 

a noble loyalty op heart which are rare. for 40 years she 
was the true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by act 
and word unweariedly forwarded him as none else could in all 
of worthy that he did or attempted. she died at london, 21st 
April, 1866, suddenly snatched from him, and the light of his life 
as if gone out. 



CHAPTER VII. 

DECADENCE. 
[1866-1881.] 

After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by 
" on broken wing," never brightening, slowly saddening to 
the close ; but lit up at intervals by flashes of the indom- 
itable energy that, starting from no vantage, had conquered 
a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new dy- 
nasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sym- 
pathy came to him from all directions, from the Queen 
herself downwards, and he received them with the grateful 
acknowledgment that he had, after all, been loved by his 
contemporaries. When the question arose as to his future 
life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his 
brother John, then a childless widower who had retired 
from his profession with a competence, should take up 
house together. The experiment was made, but, to the 
discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in 
some respects too much alike. John would not surrender 
himself wholly to the will or whims even of one whom he 
revered, and the attempt was, by mutual consent, aban- 
doned ; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through 
the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to him- 
self in his " gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit 
to Miss Bromley, an intimate friend of his wife, at her 
residence in Kent, accepted the invitation of the second 



chap, vil] DECADENCE. 141 

Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house at Men- 
tone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve, 18C6, under 
the kind convoy of Professor Tyndall, and remained 
breathing the balmy air and gazing on the violet sea till 
March of the following year. During the interval he oc- 
cupied himself in writing his Reminiscences, drawing pen- 
and-ink pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to 
soothe any sorrow save such as his, and taking notes of 
some of the passers-by. Of the greatest celebrity then 
encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a 
tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingen- 
ious ... a man of ardent faculty, but all gone irrevocably 
into House of Commons shape. . . . Man once of some 
wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the 
Prince, or many Princes of the Air." Back in Chelsea, 
he was harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we arc 
told, he answered, and spent a large portion of his time 
and means in charities. 

Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, 
and sometimes of conduct, he was through life consistent 
in practical benevolence. The interest in the welfare of 
the working classes that in part inspired his Sartor, Char- 
tism, and Past and Present never failed him. He was 
among the foremost in all national movements to relieve 
and solace their estate. He was, further, with an amiable 
disregard of his own maxims, overlenient towards the waifs 
and strays of humanity, in some instances careless to in- 
quire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or the 
degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposi- 
tion grew upon him : the gray of his own evening skies 
made him fuller of compassion to all who lived in the 
shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who mourned ; 
afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Conse- 



142 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

quently " the poor were always with him," writing, en- 
treating, and personally soliciting all sorts of alms, from 
advice and help to ready money. His biographer informs 
us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any of these 
various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is 
a manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy ; he 
gave a guinea to a ticket-of -leave-man, pretending to be a 
decayed tradesman ; and a shilling to a street sweeper, who 
at once took it over his crossing to a gin-shop. Froude 
remonstrated ; " poor fellow," was the answer, " I dare say 
he is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is 
less warmly cherished among the dales of Westmoreland 
than that of Carlyle in the lanes of Chelsea, where " his 
one expensive luxury was charity." 

His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years 
he still took a more or less prominent part, represents him 
on his sterner side. The first of these was the controversy 
about Governor Eyre, who, having suppressed the Jamaica 
rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel use of martial 
law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon — the man 
whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary — 
without any law at all, was by the force of popular indig- 
nation dismissed in disgrace, and then arraigned for mis- 
government and illegality. In the movement which result- 
ed in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was 
doubtless the usual amount of exaggeration — represented 
by the violent language of one of Carlyle's minor biogra- 
phers : " There were more innocent people slain than at 
Jeffrey's Bloody Assize ;" " The massacre of Glencoe was 
nothing to it ;" " Members of Christian Churches were 
flogged," etc., etc. — but among its leaders there were so 
many men of mark and celebrity, men like John S. Mill, 
T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin Smith, 



til] DECADENCE. 143 

Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not 
be set aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard 
test of Carlyle's theory of strong government; and he stood 
to his colours. Years before, on John Sterling suggesting 
that the negroes themselves should be consulted as to 
making a permanent engagement with their masters, he 
had said, " I never thought the rights of the negroes worth 
much discussing in any form. Quashee will get himself 
made a slave again, and with beneficent whip will be com- 
pelled to work." On this occasion he regarded the black 
rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organ- 
ised and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined 
or backed by Ruskin, Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. 
Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. " I never," says 
Mr. Froude, " knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." 
He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself 
heart and soul for the " brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear 
man," who when the ship was on fire " had been called to 
account for having flung a bucket or two of water into the 
hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some 
of the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and de- 
served to be made "dictator of Jamaica for the next 
twenty-five years," to govern after the model of Dr. Francia 
in Paraguay. The committee failed to get Eyre reinstalled 
or his pension restored ; but the impeachment was unsuc- 
cessful. 

The next great event was the passing of the Reform 
Bill of 1867, by the Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to 
this method of " dishing the Whigs," by outbidding them 
in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous 
tract called Shooting Niagara, written in the spirit of the 
Latter-Day Pamphlets — Carlyle's final and unqualified de- 
nunciation of this concession to Democracy and all its 



144 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

works. But the upper classes in England seemed indiffer- 
ent to the warning. " Niagara, or what you like," the 
author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, 
" we will at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when 
Church and State have gone." A mot emphatically of the 
decadence. 

Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions 
being a means of bringing the Irish question within the 
range of practical politics. 

I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of those 
Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house had decided to 
expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, which latter seemed to 
have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor arsenic, and are trying to pre- 
vail by the method of love. 

Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland and 
Cromwell's storm of Drogheda for his texts, or Otto von 
Bismarck, would have been, in his view, in place at Dublin 
Castle. 

In the next great event of the century, the close of the 
greatest European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which 
pleased Cato pleased also the gods. Carlyle, especially in 
his later days, had a deepening confidence in the Teutonic, 
a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He regarded the con- 
test between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, 
and wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with 
exultation. When a feeling began in this country, naming 
itself sympathy for the fallen — really half that, the other 
half, as in the American war, being jealousy of the victor 
— and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a decisive 
letter to the Times, November 11th, 1870, tracing the 
sources of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., 
and ridiculing the prevailing sentiment about the recapt- 



vii.] DECADENCE. 145 

ured provinces of Lothringen and Elsass. With a possible 
reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he remarks : 

They believe that they are the " Christ of Nations." ... I wish 
they would inquire whether there might not be a Cartouche of na- 
tions. Cartouche had many gallant qualities — had many fine ladies 
begging locks of his hair while the indispensable gibbet was prepar- 
ing. Better he should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, 
who has him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part 
of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and try to be- 
come again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does not come to the 
rescue in gratitude for the heavenly illumination it is getting from 
France : nor could all Europe if it did prevent that awful Chancellor 
from having his own way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, 
will be dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands again. 
. . . Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck is still prev- 
alent in England. He, as I read him, is not a person of Napoleonic 
ideas, but of ideas quite superior to Napoleonic. . . . That noble, pa- 
tient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into 
a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, 
vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive 
France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in my time. 

Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more 
justice. Only, to be complete, his paper should have ended 
with a warning. He has done more than any other writer 
to perpetuate in England the memories of the great think- 
ers and actors — Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Korner, Stein, 
Goethe — who taught their countrymen how to endure de- 
feat and retrieve adversity. Who will celebrate their yet 
undefined successors, who will train Germany gracefully to 
bear the burden of prosperity ? Two years later Carlyle 
wrote, or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to 
shake, his historical sketch of the Early Kings of Norway ', 
showing no diminution of power either of thought or ex- 
pression, his estimates of the three Hakons and of the three 
1 



146 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Olafs being especially notable; and a paper on The Por- 
traits of John Knox, the prevailing dull gray of which is 
relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. 

He was incited to another public protest, when, in May, 
1877, towards the close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had 
got, or imagined himself to have got, reliable information 
that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, having sent 
our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli 
and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems 
to have contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alli- 
ance against the forces of civilised order in Europe, and he 
chose to think of the Czars as the representatives of an 
enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly interested in 
the letter he wrote to the Times, as " his last public act in 
this world " — the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give 
the letter, and unaccountably says it " was brief, not more 
than three or four lines." It is as follows : 

Sir, — A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous Premier, 
in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, intends, under 
cover of care for " British interests " to send the English fleet to the 
Baltic, or do some other feat which shall compel Russia to declare 
war against England. Latterly the rumour has shifted from the 
Baltic and become still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, 
where a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, but all 
Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I have come to know 
as an indisputable fact ; in our present affairs and outlooks surely a 
grave one. 

As to " British interests " there is none visible or conceivable to 
me, except taking strict charge of our route to India by Suez and 
Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely steering altogether clear of any co- 
partnery with the Turk in regard to this or any other "British 
interest" whatever. It should be felt by England as a real ignominy 
to be connected with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we 
ought to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation in 
God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in it is even 



til] DECADENCE. 147 

now that of being conquered by the Russians, and gradually schooled 
and drilled into peaceable attempt at learning to be himself governed. 
The newspaper outcry against Russia is no more respectable to me 
than the howling of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest 
ignorance, egoism, and paltry national jealousy. 

These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate knowledge, 
and to all friends of their country will recommend immediate atten- 
tion to them while there is yet time, lest in a few weeks the maddest 
and most criminal thing that a British government could do, should 
be done and all Europe kindle into flames of war. — I am, etc., 

T. Carlyle. 
5 Chetne Row, Chelsea, 
May 4th. 

Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered 
to the great author and venerable sage. In 1868 he had 
by request a personal interview with the Queen, and has 
left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview at the 
Deanery of Westminster. Great artists, as Millais, Watts, 
and Boehme, vied with each other, in painting or sculpture, 
to preserve his lineaments ; prominent reviews to record 
their impression of his work, and disciples to show their 
gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson of Edinburgh, 
in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a 
subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birth- 
day; but he valued more a communication of the same 
date from Prince Bismarck. Count Bernstoff from Berlin 
wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks for the 
services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was 
prevailed on to accept the Prussian " Ordre pour le merite." 
In the same year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous ob- 
livion of by-gone hostilities, to confer on him a pension 
and the " Order of the Grand Cross of the Bath," an emolu- 
ment and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, 
declined. To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed 



148 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

to be the originator of the scheme, he (December 30th) 
expressed his sense of the generosity of the Premier's let- 
ter : " It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have said 
of him, a new and unexpected stratum of genial dignity 
and manliness of character." To his brother John he 
wrote : " I do, however, truly admire the magnanimity of 
Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost 
never spoke of without contempt . . . and yet see here he 
comes with a pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That 
he was by no means gagged by personal feeling or seduced 
in matters of policy is evident from the above-quoted let- 
ter to the Times / but he liked Disraeli better than his 
great rival ; the one may have bewildered his followers, 
the other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself — 
the lie, in Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to 
borrow an epigram, " he made his conscience not his guide 
but his accomplice." " Carlyle," says Mr. Froude, " did 
not regard Mr. Gladstone merelv as an orator who, know- 
ing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force 
into specious sentiments, but as the representative of the 
numerous cants of the age . . . differing from others in that 
the cant seemed true to him. He in fact believed him to 
be one of those fatal figures created by England's evil ge- 
nius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted 
that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their 
sting. In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note 
that his methods of reforming the world and Mr. Glad- 
stone's were as far as the poles asunder ; and the admirers 
of the latter may console themselves with the reflection 
that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal 
disdain of the scientific discoverers of the age — conspicu- 
ously of Mr. Darwin, whom he describes as " evolving 
man's soul from frog spawn," adding, " I have no patience 



til] DECADENCE. 149 

with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other 
criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose Adam Bede he 
pronounced " simply dull," display a curious limitation or 
obtuseness of mind. 

One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is 
the ardour of his attachment to the few staunch friends 
who helped to cheer and console them. He had a sincere 
regard for Fitzjames Stephen, " an honest man with heavy 
strokes;" for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in 
effect, "Your duty one day will be to take away that 
bauble and close the doors of the House of Discord ;" for 
Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their differences; for 
Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" phi- 
lanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, 
the last of whom was a frequent visitor till near the end. 
Froude he had bound to his soul by hoops of steel ; and a 
more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention always, in 
practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of 
judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's 
highest praise is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded 
as no mere art critic, but as a moral power worthy to re- 
ceive and carry onward his own " cross of fire." The re- 
lationship between the two great writers is uncheckered by 
any shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or 
adulation on the other. The elder recognised in the 
younger an intellect as keen, a spirit as fearless as his own, 
who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his rapier to 
the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," i.e. Popular 
Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the Stones of 
Venice, the most solid structure of the group, he named 
11 Sermons in Stones ;" he resented an attack on Sesame 
and Lilies as if it had been his own ; and passages of the 
Queen of the Air went into his heart " like arrows." The 



150 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Order of the Rose has attempted a practical embodiment 
of the review contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive 
to the money-making practice and expediency worships of 
the day. 

Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in 
order. In 1867, on return from Mentone, he had recorded 
his bequest of the revenues of Craigenputtock for the en- 
dowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the University 
of Edinburgh. In 18*73 he made his will, leaving John 
Forster and Froude his literary executors : a legacy of trust 
which, on the death of the former, fell to the latter, to 
whose discretion, by various later bequests, less and less 
limited, there was confided the choice — at last almost made 
a duty — of editing and publishing the manuscripts and 
journals of himself and his wife. 

Early in his seventy-third year (December, 1867) Carlyle 
quotes, " Youth is a garland of roses," adding, " I did not 
find it such. ' Age is a crown of thorns.' Neither is this 
altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow tend to 
loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more de- 
sirable." The talk of Socrates in the Republic, and the 
fine phrases in Cicero's De Senectute, hardly touch on the 
great grief, apart from physical infirmities, of old age — its 
increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man may make dis- 
ciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones 
die daily ; the " familiar faces " vanish in the night to which 
there is no morning, and leave nothing in their stead. 

During these years Carlyle's former intimates were fall- 
ing round him like the leaves from an autumn tree, and 
the kind care of the few survivors, with the solicitous at- 
tention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary Aitken, 
left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine 
and John Forster and Wilberforce, with whom he thought 



til] DECADENCE. 151 

he agreed, and Mill, bis old champion and ally, with whom 
he so disagreed that he almost maligned his memory — 
calling one of the most interesting of autobiographies " the 
life of a logic-chopping machine." In March, 1876, he 
attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley ; in the fol- 
lowing month his brother Aleck died in Canada ; and in 

1878 his brother John at Dumfries. He seemed destined 
to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. In 

1879 he and his last horse " Comet " had their last ride to- 
gether; later, his right hand failed, and he had to write 
by dictation. In the gathering gloom he began to look 
on death as a release from the shreds of life, and to envy 
the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts 
turned more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible 
dreams hereafter, and his longing for his lost Jeannie made 
him beat at the iron gates of the " Undiscovered Country " 
with a yearning cry, but he could get no answer from rea- 
son, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, 
least of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven " by way 
of mesmeric and spiritualistic trances." His question and 
answer are always : 

Strength quite a stranger to me. . . . Life is verily a weariness on 
those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were my time come. 
Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, those that are away. 
That ... is now and then the whisper of my worn-out heart, and a 
kind of solace to me. " But why annihilation or eternal sleep ?" I 
ask, too. They and I are alike in the will of the Highest. 

" When," says Mr. Froude, " he spoke of the future and 
its uncertainties, he fell back invariably on the last words 
of his favourite hymn : 

Wir heissen euch hoffen." 



152 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's 
"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow ;" Burns's line, 
" Had we never lo'ed sae kindly " — thinking of the tomb 
which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' in Haddington 
Church — the lines from " The Tempest " ending, " our 
little life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in " Cym- 
beline." He lived on during the last years, save for his 
quiet walks with his biographer about the banks of the 
Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life slowly 
ebbing till, on February 4th, 1881, it ebbed away. His 
remains were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan 
and laid under the snow-clad soil of the rural church-yard, 
beside the dust of his kin. He had objected to be buried, 
should the request be made (as it was by Dean Stanley), in 
Westminster Abbey : avhpiov yap Eirityavutv 7ra<7a yfj ra<poQ. 
Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it 
more difficult to estimate the character than that of Thomas 
Carlyle, and regarding no one of equal eminence, with the 
possible exception of Byron, has opinion been so divided. 
After his death there was a carnival of applause from his 
countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San 
Francisco. Their hot zeal, only equalled by that of their 
revelries over the memory of Burns, was unrestrained by 
limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer than the 
Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried : one 
perfervid enthusiast says of the former, "Atheist, Deist, 
and Pantheist: Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the 
naked heavens, majestic, free, will be heard no more :" the 
Scotsman newspaper writes of him as " probably the great- 
est of modern literary men ; . . . before the volcanic glare 
of his French Revolution all Epics, ancient and modern, 
grow pale and shadowy, ... his like is not now left in the 
world." More recently a stalwart Aberdonian, on helping 



vii.] DECADENCE. 153 

to put a bust into a monument, exclaims in a strain of 
genuine ardour, " I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that 
his heart was as large and generous as his brain was pow- 
erful ; that he was essentially a most lovable man, and that 
there were depths of tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, 
and most delicate courtesy in him, with all his seeming 
ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found through- 
out my life rarely in any human being." 

On the other side, a little later, after the publication of 
the Reminiscences, Blackwood denounced the " old man 
eloquent " as " a blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were 
the only person who knew good from bad. . . . Every one 
and everything dealt with in his History is treated in the 
tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The World remarks 
that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthu- 
mous depreciation for a factitious fame ; " but the game 
of venomous recrimination was begun by himself. . . . 
There is little that is extraordinary, still less that is heroic 
in his character. He had no magnanimity about him . . . 
he was full of littleness and weakness, of shallow dogma- 
tism and of blustering conceit." The Quarterly, after 
alluding to Carlyle's style " as the eccentric expression of 
eccentricity," denounces his choice of " heroes " as reckless 
of morality. According to the same authority, he " was 
not a deep thinker, but he was a great word painter ... he 
has the inspiration as well as the contortions of the Sibyl, 
the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In 
the French Revolution he rarely condescends to plain nar- 
rative ... it resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so 
many acts and tableaux. . . . The raisers of busts and statues 
in his honour are winging and pointing new arrows aimed at 
the reputation of their most distinguished contemporaries, 

and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." 
>7# 



154 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Fraser, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of 
dissent: "Money, for which he cared little, only came in 
quantity after the death of his wife, when everything became 
indifferent to an old and life-weary man. Who would be 
great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery 
with so much labour ? Most men like their work. In his 
Carlyle seems to have found the curse imposed upon Adam. 
. . . He cultivated contempt of the kindly race of men." 

Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be 
found in the pages of Mr. Froude, and he has been ac- 
cused by Carlyle's devotees of having supplied this material 
of malice prepense. No accusation was ever more ridicu- 
lously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, 
Froude appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most 
infatuated of friends. Living towards the close in almost 
daily communion with his master, and in inevitable contact 
with his numerous frailties, he seems to have revered him 
with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to 
him in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects 
of his mock heroics, every mental as well as every moral 
power, e.g., " Had Carlyle turned his mind to it he would 
have been a great philologer." " A great diplomatist was 
lost in Carlyle." " He would have done better as a man 
of action than a man of words." By kicking the other 
diplomatists into the sea, as he threatened to do with the 
urchins of Kirkcaldy? Froude's panegyrics are in style 
and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of Pericles 
by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes 
his only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero 
— amounting to the assertions that he was never seriously 
wrong ; that he was as good as he was great ; that " in 
the weightier matters of the law his life had been without 
speck or flaw ;" that " such faults as he had were but as 



vil] DECADENCE. 155 

the vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable 
from the nature of the man ;" that he never, in their in- 
tercourse, uttered a " trivial word, nor one which he had 
better have left unuttered" — these claims will never be 
honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after 
that on which they appear : e.g. in the Biography, vol. iv., 
p. 258, we are told that Carlyle's " knowledge was not in 
points or lines but complete and solid :" facing the re- 
marks we read, "He liked ill men like Humboldt, Laplace, 
or the author of the Vestiges. He refused Darwin's trans- 
mutation of species as unproved ; he fought against it, 
though I could see he dreaded that it might turn out 
true." The statement that " he always spoke respectfully 
of Macaulay " is soon followed by criticisms that make us 
exclaim, " Save us from such respect." The extraordinary 
assertion that Carlyle was "always just in speaking of 
living men " is safeguarded by the quotation of large utter- 
ances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, Byron, Shel- 
ley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and 
disparaging patronage ' of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and 
of Mill. The dog-like fidelity of Bos well and Eckermann 
was fitting to their attitude and capacity ; but the spectacle 
of one great writer surrendering himself to another is a 
new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. 

Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled — that 
is, largely soured. He was never a Tiraon ; but, while at 

1 This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own 
level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as 
if he were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of 
merely dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland 
has endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of 
the noble tragedy of " Elia's " life ; but this contention cannot be 
made good as regards the later attacks. 



156 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

best a Stoic, he was at worst a Cynic, emulous though dis- 
dainful, trying all men by his own standard, and intolerant 
of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed 
the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, 
amid kindred more noted for strength than for amenity, 
whom he loved, trusted, and revered, but from whose grim 
creed, formally at least, he had to tear himself with vio- 
lent wrenches apart ; his purgatory among the border- 
ruffians of Annan school ; his teaching drudgeries ; his 
hermit college days ; ten years' struggle for a meagre com- 
petence; a life-long groaning under the Nemesis shirt of 
the irritable yet stubborn constitution to which genius is 
often heir ; and above all his unusually late recognition. 
There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference to 
the long refusal by the publishers of his first original 
work — an idyll like Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and 
our finest prose poem in philosophy. " Popularity," says 
Emerson, " is for dolls ;" but it remains to find the 
preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust 
criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates 
giants, but to the latter also there is great harm done. Op- 
position affected Carlyle as it affected Milton; it made 
him defiant, at times even fierce, to those beyond his own 
inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success 
without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. 
He was crowned; but his coronation came too late, and 
the death of his wife paralysed his later years. 

Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the 
Forth to the Cam, make it their pastime to sneer at living 
worth, compare Ben Jonson's lines, 

Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, 
One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, 



vii.,] DECADENCE. 157 

with Samuel Johnson's, " It has been delayed till most of 
those whom I wished to please are sunk into the grave, 
and success and failure are empty sounds," and then take 
to heart the following : 

The " recent return of popularity greater than ever," which I hear 
of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair ; especially to the 
Edinburgh " Address," and affords new proof of the singularly dark 
and feeble condition of " public judgment " at this time. No idea, 
or shadow of an idea, is in that Address but what had been set 
forth by me tens of times before, and the poor gaping sea of pruri- 
ent blockheadism receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and 
runs to buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done 
with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me £10,000 
a year and bray unanimously their hosannas heaven - high for the 
rest of my life, who now would there be to get the smallest joy or 
profit from it? To me I feel as if it would be a silent sorrow rather, 
and would bring me painful retrospections, nothing else. 

We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from 
attaches flaunting their intimacy, to assure us that there 
were "depths of tenderness" in Carlyle. His susceptibility 
to the softer influences of nature, of family life, of his few 
chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his 
biography, above all in the Reminiscences, those supreme 
records of regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereave- 
ment. There is no surge of sorrow in our literature like 
that which is perpetually tossed up in the second chapter 
of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten re- 
frain — 

Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not 
till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are ; oh, think, if thou 
yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry 
little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be at last 
so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late ! 



loH TIIOMAI! OAltl.Yl.i; |,i, m - 

W«rn \vr.i.l«,| I... I. mi" I,.,". Mmr l.lm l,lii.< iim.i.I. pithotiC 

.< iii,« im, . 111 ..in i. .ii.-ii, im, ijo/vi' !v.\.r<\ i,ii, quiitlon, 

41 Ami li.ivc liri i|.ni"lil«i", |,|.,ii"lii. linn !,«. Mil,". |»:i,iif' wn 

ihould loloot Swift's oomniAnt on '■•"• lool oi BtollAj lt Only 

A wciii.iii ':. hill ," Mm ,iy ,,| '| ', n n y || ,11 ' | EHgpftU, " Tim 

bonoi bud movsd In ray ildo}" "•«i <'.niyi<v. w«il, "Oh, 
that I bid you yi it but for ttvfl nlnutoj bo Ida m< , i" tall 
y-Mi nil." i » 1 1 1. in MiiMvvn w<- iii n ..iiiy Mir (tapping °' the 
folds oi Ul», " ttropltumqua Aohorontli rvaf] 

aii >.i mm him that rimaluod In ray lift iwit out in that luddon 

". ni, ah ..i nil. ngth i ifton lotmi to havt g vv...-, 

ii p< ii nun, J, i would proy, but to whom? i .mi will undoritand 
iii.-, Invocation ol lalnti Ono'i pntyfi m>w Iihm i<> im v,,i.,i. m, 

d I Willi III.- In in I, ulill, hill, nliio Willi III. I, In ,1.11 iiiiim, . . , 

ii.' i. ii iii. i. ty Bho not hiM I oannot Icoop It foi lioi non\ Iiond 

n gift to i"".i old Dotty, who noxt to ray i II pi mi rabi pi hi i In llfi 
long lovo and laorod iopfow Thli li all X oan do ■ . Tlraowaito 

I r. Pi III I , ' I > v. i v i .... I y | 1, 1 1 1, 'I'm in •■ I him not to mi v OXttnti BOP, '" 

ii niii, did i "Hi' ii wl ill hlra 

Qui v'Ih' ii iron Ip la ot fi Igldn lliigua, 
Qui pdloi " '"i" pofi " ibant fluralni i Ip i 

< '.nlylr'n pntllON, In ll"IH I" II'", « '.lilllii'l 1,0 111* own 

(•iiiiiiniiy, wiiii rondy to rwaIcq At Avory touolii " I wai 

wnlluii;- willi linn," wiiln. I'ioii.I'-, "mm Blind Ay Aftl i in.. .ii 

III r.ill.i < i I'ul III I, lir ..|.ili in. In ;iiii..ii" Mm I, I'm , 

ww\ n blind """I nmi in", 'i.nmiiiii, niin ilnglng hyninij bi 

boo I'.niv""". i" i "ii iomo in.i iiiiinni,. v\'n itood lliton 

ill^. Sim i, .ii." Ii'.il.n'r. ' IM. .| hum of Mm NmliL' Tim 

wonlu win- trlvlfll, I- ni Mm .-hi, Mmimli i. unpin, 1 1 : i . I n • 

thing w< ml ami nm. nl, l.ly ftDOUt it. ' TaIC! nm inviiy,' Im 

mi, iftor a f aw nmiiii.ru, * i iHaII ory ii I itAy longoi 

Tim limlmmln.ly, "ollni ft| <.l <|..|» mi ny li../,.n l,..r 



vii.] DECADENCE. 159 

pid," that runs through his writing, that makes him fore- 
cast death in life, and paint the springs of nature in winter 
hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," the sunsets 
"beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in 
a manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne and 
De Quincey and other colour dramatists, because we feel 
it is as genuine as the melancholy of Burns. Both had 
the relief of humour, but Burns only of the two was capa- 
ble of gaiety. " Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, point- 
ing to the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony 
that sings with infinite voices an eternal song of hope in 
the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair sicht," was the reply. 

We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of 
Carlyle's practical benevolence. To all deserving persons 
in misfortune he was a good Samaritan, and like all bene- 
factors the dupe of some undeserving. Charity may be, 
like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but it is 
so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money 
Carlyle's career is exemplary. He had too much common- 
sense to affect to despise it, and was restive when he was 
underpaid; he knew that the labourer was worthy of his 
hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to 
have ever worked for wages; his concern was rather with 
the quality of his work, and, regardless of results, he always 
did his best. A more unworldly man never lived ; from 
his first savings he paid ample tributes to filial piety and 
fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life retained the 
simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste 
of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities 
even to excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to 
his sister, " the Craw," he says, " remember in marriage 
you have undertaken to do to others as you would wish 
they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. 



160 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

" Carlyle," writes Longfellow, " was one of those men 
who sacrificed their happiness to their work ;" the misfort- 
une is that the sacrifice did not stop with himself. He 
seemed made to live with no one but himself. Alternately 
courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went 
into his creations ; he could not put himself into the place 
of those near him. Essentially perhaps the bravest man 
of his age, he would turn not an inch aside for threat or 
flattery ; integer vitce, conscience never made him a coward. 
He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus 
Aurelius : his reception of the loss of his first volume of the 
French Revolution was worthy of Sidney or of Newton : 
his letters, when the successive deaths of almost all that 
were dearest left him desolate, are among the noblest, the 
most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. Yet, says 
Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must 
endorse : " Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least 
patient of the common woes of humanity." " A positive 
Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, " in bearing others' pain, he 
was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by a pin," and 
his biographer corroborates this : " If matters went well 
with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be 
going ill with any one else ; and, on the other hand, if he 
were uncomfortable he required all the world to be uncom- 
fortable along with him." He did his work with more than 
the tenacity of a Prescotfc or a Fawcett, but no man ever 
made so much noise over it as this apostle of silence. 
" Sins of passion he could forgive, but those of insincerity 
never." Carlyle has no tinge of insincerity ; his writing, 
his conversation, his life, is absolutely, dangerously transpar- 
ent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one of the 
sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit 
of rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. 



vii.] DECADENCE. 161 

Sullen moods, and " words at random sent," those judg- 
ing him from a distance can easily condone ; the errors of 
a hot head are pardonable to one who, in his calmer hours, 
was ready to confess them. "Your temptation and mine," 
he writes to his brother Alexander, " is a tendency to im- 
periousness and indignant self-help ; and, if no wise theo- 
retical, yet practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt 
of other men." His nicknaming mania was the inherit- 
ance of a family failing, always fostered by the mocking- 
bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount 
many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral ser- 
mon, charitably says, that in pronouncing the population 
of England to be " thirty millions, mostly fools," Carlyle 
merely meant that " few are chosen and strait is the gate," 
generously adding — " There was that in him, in spite of 
his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which en- 
deared him to those who knew him best. The idols of 
their market-place he trampled underfoot, but their joys 
and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to him revered 
things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it 
had in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his 
harsh judgments of eminent men were based on the belief 
that they had allowed meaner to triumph over higher im- 
pulses, or influences of society to injure their moral fibre. 
This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's 
ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart 
from his own, as the leaders of science, definite theological 
enlightenment, or even poetry and arts was an intellectual 
rather than a moral flaw; but in the implied assertion, 
"what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to regret 
the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous 
powers, which, beginning with his student days, possessed 
him to the last. The fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, 



162 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

whose works he came to regard as the spoon-meat of his 
"rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his or of 
any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot ca- 
reer, as a "rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's in- 
trepid thought as that of a mere machine, he was astray 
on more delicate ground, and alienated some of his truest 
friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century 
literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the 
want of loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce 
because he largely shares in it. " No sadder proof," he 
declares, "can be given by a man of his own littleness 
than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more 
to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of 
the past; but rarely do either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a 
good word for any considerable English writer then living. 
It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all 
his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that 
"only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his 
self-entitled " rigmarole on the Norse Kings :" but he would 
not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just 
strictures on the " Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the im- 
pertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant 
the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, he overesti- 
mated those who were content to be his echoes. Material 
help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he 
used and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who 
had preceded him in his lines of historical investigation, 
as if they had been poachers on his premises, e.g. Heath, 
the royalist writer of the Commonwealth time, is " carrion 
Heath :" Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is " my 
reverend imbecile friend :" his predecessors in Friedrich, as 
Schlosser, Preuss, Ranke, Forster, Vehse, are " dark chaotic 
dullards whose books are mere blotches of printed stupor, 



til] DECADENCE. 163 

tumbled mountains of marine stores" — criticism valueless 
even when it raises the laughter due to a pantomime. 
Carlyle assailed three sets of people : 

1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom 

he believed to have behaved, badly to him. 

2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could 

not understand — as Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Cole- 
ridge, and the leaders of Physics and Metaphysics. 

3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him 

an unrestricted homage or an implicit following, 
as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. 

The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his 
strictures been always just, so winged with humorous epi- 
gram, they would have blasted a score of reputations : as 
it is they have only served to mar his own. He was a 
typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the 
olcrrpoQ of their ambitious competition and restless push, 
wanting in repose, never like 

a gentleman at ease 
With moral breadth of temperament, 

too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call 
this man as good as me." Bacon, in one of his finest an- 
titheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence 
and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both ; 
he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of 
his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but 
when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his 
own figure, " a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those 
of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the 
tombs of his family in the church-yard of Ecclefechan. 



164 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one 
of his ruling passions. To one of his brothers on the birth 
of a daughter, he writes, " Train her to this, as the corner- 
stone of all morality, to stand by the truth, to abhor a lie 
as she does hell-fire." The " gates of hell " is the phrase 
of Achilles ; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with 
the Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that " Socrates 
is terribly at ease in Zion :" he liked no one to be at ease 
anywhere. He is angry with Walter Scott because he 
hunted with his friends over the breezy heath instead of 
mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's Memoirs 
in the morning, the Reminiscences at night, and dispute if 
you like about the greater genius, but never about the 
healthier, better, and larger man. 

Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which 
obeys the mandate, " walk by your light." Hellenism the 
spirit which remembers the other, " have a care your light 
be not darkness;" the former prefers doing to thinking, 
the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is 
a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. 
A man of inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs, and 
crevasses, let us take from him what the gods or proto- 
plasms have allowed. His way of life, 1 duly admired for 



1 In the Times of February 7th, 1881, there appeared an interesting 
account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have sur- 
passed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and 
late in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the 
day's duties. At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit 
moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until three 
o'clock. Nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was 
allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and 
seeing friends. ... In the evening he read and prepared for the work 
of the morrow." 



vil] DECADENCE. 165 

its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim — eighty 
years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward, left 
him austere to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him 
in the repellent isolation which is the wrong side of un- 
compromising dignity. He was too great to be, in the 
common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power 
left him with the feeling of Newton, "lam a child gather- 
ing shells on the shore :" but what sense he had of falli- 
bility arose from his glimpse of the infinite sea, never from 
any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he might be 
wrong and another mortal right : Shelley's lines on Byron : 

The sense that he was greater than his kind 
Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind 
By gazing on its own exceeding light — 

fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, " What can you say of Car- 
lyle but that he was born in the clouds and struck by the 
lightning," which withers while it immortalises. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 

Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of 
a profession made for him by his parents was in some 
measure justified ; but he was also a keen Critic, uname- 
nable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of the revolu- 
tionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its 
extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various 
opinions will continue to be held as to the value of his 
sermons ; the excellence of his best workmanship is uni- 
versally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of the 
qualities which secure a quick success — fluency, finish 
of style, the art of giving graceful utterance to current 
thought ; he had in full measure the stronger if slower 
powers — sound knowledge, infinite industry, and the sym- 
pathetic insight of penetrative imagination — that ultimate- 
ly hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his 
hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened 
their circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, 
repetition in Carlyle's work ; the range of his ideas is lim- 
ited ; he plays on a few strings with wonderfully versatile 
variations; in reading his later we are continually con- 
fronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. 
But, after the perfunctory work for Brewster, he wrote 



chap, viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 16V 

nothing wholly commonplace ; occasionally paradoxical to 
the verge of absurdity, he is never dull. 

Setting aside his Translations, always in prose, often 
in verse, masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark 
in Criticism, which may be regarded as a higher kind of 
translation : the great value of his work in this direction 
is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism has for its 
aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the 
author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of review- 
ing, not even now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote : 

The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch him- 
self resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his author, and there- 
from to show as if he commanded him and looked down upon him 
by natural superiority of stature. Whatsoever the great man says 
or does the little man shall treat with an air of knowingness and 
light condescending mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm 
that this or that is beyond his comprehension, and cunningly asking 
his readers if they comprehend it. 

There is here, perhaps, some " covert sarcasm " directed 
against contemporaries who forgot that their mission was 
to pronounce on the merits of the books reviewed, and not 
to patronise their authors ; it may be set beside the objec- 
tion to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, " I like this ; I do not 
like that," without giving the reason why. But in this 
instance the writer did reck his own rede. The tempta- 
tion of a smart critic is to seek or select legitimate or ille- 
gitimate objects of attack ; and that Carlyle was well armed 
with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his essays as in 
his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and conver- 
sation. His examination of the German Playwrights, of 
Taylor's German Literature, and his inimitable sketch of 
Herr Doring, the hapless biographer of Richter, are as 



168 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

amusing as Macaulay's coup-de-gr&ce to Robert Montgom- 
ery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart 
these sentences of his essay on Voltaire r 1 

Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of great- 
ness ; that no great man can have other than a rigid vinegar aspect 
of countenance, never to be thawed or wanned by billows of mirth. 
There are things in this world to be laughed at as well as things to 
be admired. Nevertheless, contempt is a dangerous element to sport 
in ; a deadly one if we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of 
admiration, is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high 
souls ; unwisely directed, it leads to many evils ; but without it, there 
cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is the smallest of 
all faculties that other men are at pains to repay with any esteem. 
... Its nourishment and essence is denial, which hovers only on the 
surface, while knowledge dwells far below, ... it cherishes nothing 
but our vanity, which may in general be left safely enough to shift 
for itself. 

We may compare with this one of the writer's numer- 
ous warnings to young men talcing to literature, as to 
drinking, in despair of anything better to do, ending with 
tho exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not witty ;" 
or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott: 

Is it with case or not with ease that a man shall do his best in 
any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of soul's travail, 
working in the deep places of thought ? . . . Not so now nor at any 
time. . . . Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready writers ? The whole 
Prophecies of Isaiah are not equal in extent to this cobweb of a Re- 
view article. Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity, but 



1 As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. 
Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told " not what is not true, but what 
is true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of the En- 
cyclopaedists. 



viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 169 

not till he had thought with intensity, ... no easy writer he. Neither 
was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with ease. Goethe 
tells us he " had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no page of his 
but he knew well how it came there. Schiller — " konnte nie fer- 
tig werden" — never could get done. Dante sees himself "growing 
lean" over his Divme Comedy ; in stern solitary death wrestle with 
it, to prevail over it and do it, if his uttermost faculty may ; hence, 
too, it is done and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for 
evermore among men. No ; creation, one would think, cannot be 
easy ; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, out of 
which an armed Pallas is struggling ! As for manufacture, that is a 
different matter. . . . Write by steam if thou canst contrive it and 
sell it, but hide it like virtue. 

In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of 
Carlyle's slow recognition, long struggle, and ultimate suc- 
cess; also of his occasional critical intolerance. Com- 
mander-in-chief of the " red artillery," he sets too little 
store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of 
the light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but con- 
tempt for the banter of men like Jerrold ; despises the 
genial pathos of Lamb ; and salutes the most brilliant wit 
and exquisite lyrist of our century with the Puritanical 
comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he 
deified strength ; and so often stimulated his imitators to 
attempt to leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will 
not do everything: a man can only accomplish what he 
was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of ambition 
doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in 
every ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student 
to be a philosopher. Nature does half : after all, perhaps 
the larger half. Genius has been absurdly defined as " an 
infinite capacity for taking trouble;" no amount of pump- 
ing can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in 
" the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's 
8 



170 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

" worship of sorrow " till it became a pride in pain. He 
forgot that rude energy requires restraint. Hercules Fu- 
rens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut down trees ; 
they tore them up ; but to no useful end. His power is 
often almost Miltonic ; it is never Shakespearian ; and his 
insistent earnestness would run the risk of fatiguing us 
were it not redeemed by his humour. But he errs on the 
better side ; and his example is a salutary counteractive in 
an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the 
air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of 
truth. His stern conception of literature accounts for his 
exaltations of the ideal, and denunciations of the actual, 
profession of letters in passages which, from his habit of 
emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of striking a 
balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The 
following condenses the ideal : 

If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high 
and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have guidance, free- 
dom, immortality. These two in all degrees I honour ; all else is 
chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. Doubt, 
desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself — all these like hell- 
hounds lie beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every 
man ; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all 
these are stifled — all these shrink murmuring far off in their caves. 

Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the 
crime of worthless writing, e.g. : 

No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, 
without saying something ; he knows not what mischief he does, past 
computation, scattering words without meaning, to afflict the whole 
world yet before they cease. For thistle-down flies abroad on all 
winds and airs of wind. . . . Ship-loads of fashionable novels, senti- 
mental rhymes, tragedies, farces . . . tales by flood and field are swal- 



viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 171 

lowed monthly into the bottomless pool ; still does the press toil, . . . 
and still in torrents rushes on the great army of publications to their 
final home ; and still oblivion, like the grave, cries Give ! give ! How- 
is it that of all these countless multitudes no one can . . . produce 
aught that shall endure longer than "snow-flake on the river? 
Because they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." 
Not by printing-ink alone does man live. Literature, as followed at 
present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, where the cooks use 
poison, and vend it by telling innumerable lies. 



These passages owe their interest to the attestation of 
their sincerity by the writer's own practice. " Do not," 
he counsels one of his unknown correspondents, " take up 
a subject because it is singular and will get you credit, but 
because you love it," and he himself acted on the rule. 
Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than 
his thoroughness. He never took a task in hand without 
the determination to perform it to the utmost of his abil- 
ity ; consequently when he satisfied himself that he was 
master of his subject he satisfied his readers ; but this mas- 
tery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most 
rigorous research. He seems to have written down his 
results with considerable fluency ; the molten ore flowed 
freely forth, but the process of smelting was arduous. The 
most painful part of literary work is not the actual compo- 
sition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome com- 
pilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sift- 
ing of the grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This 
part of his task Carlyle performed with an admirable con- 
scientiousness. His numerous letters applying for out-of- 
the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet throw- 
ing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful 
exactitude which rarely permitted him to leave any record 
unread or any worthy opinion untested about any event 



172 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

of which or any person of whom he undertook to write. 
From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of 
Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbe 
Georgel, and every attainable account of Cagliostro and 
the Countess de la Motte, to fuse into The Diamond 
Necklace. To write the essay on Werner and the German 
Playwrights he swam through seas of trash. He digested 
the whole of Diderot for one review article. He seems to 
have read through Jean Paul Richter, a feat to accomplish 
which Germans require a special dictionary. When en- 
gaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole shoal of 
obscure seventeenth - century papers from Yarmouth, the 
remnant of a yet larger heap, "read hundred-weights of 
dreary books," and endured "a hundred Museum head- 
aches." In grappling with Friedrich he waded through 
so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping 
condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes 
and places of which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to 
Prague, and explored the battle-fields. Work done after 
this fashion seldom brings a swift return ; but if it is util- 
ized and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to 
permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of 
proportion is defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Car- 
lyle puts his ample material to artistic use ; seldom making 
ostentation of detail, but skilfully concentrating, so that 
we read easily and readily recall what he has written. Al- 
most everything he has done has made a mark; his best 
work in criticism is final, it does not require to be done 
again. He interests us in the fortunes of his leading char- 
acters ; first, because he feels with them ; secondly, because 
he knows how to distinguish the essence from the accidents 
of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, where 
to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biog- 



viil] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 173 

raphies, as of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter no- 
tices in his Essays, are intrinsically more complete and 
throw more real light on character than whole volumes of 
ordinary memoirs. 

With the limitations above referred to, and in view of 
his antecedents, the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation 
is wonderfully wide. Often perversely unfair to the ma- 
jority of his English contemporaries, the scales seem to fall 
from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of other na- 
tions. The charity expressed in the saying that we should 
judge men, not by the number of their faults, but by the 
amount of their deflection from the circle, great or small, 
that bounds their being, enables him often to do justice to 
those most widely differing in creed, sentiment, and lines 
of activity from each other and from himself. When treat- 
ing congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than 
by depreciation : among the qualities of his early work, 
which afterwards suffered some eclipse in the growth of 
other powers, is its flexibility. It was natural for Carlyle, 
his successor in genius in the Scotch lowlands, to give an 
account of Robert Burns which throws all previous criti- 
cism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong 
affinities to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his 
so-called heroes ; but he is fair to the characters, if not al- 
ways to the works, of Voltaire and Diderot, slurs over or 
makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is undeterred 
by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his wor- 
ship fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. 

Carlyle's Essays mark an epoch, i.e., the beginning of 
a new era, in the history of British criticism. The able 
and vigorous writers who contributed to the early numbers 
of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews successfully ap- 
plied their taste and judgment to such works as fell within 



174 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; 
but they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond 
the range of their insular view. In dealing with the efforts 
of a nation whose literature, the most recent in Europe 
save that of Russia, had only begun to command recogni- 
tion, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. 
If the old formulae have been theoretically dismissed, and 
a conscientious critic now endeavours to place himself in 
the position of his author, the change is largely due to the 
influence of Carlyle's Miscellanies. Previous to their ap- 
pearance, the literature of Germany, to which half of these 
papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir 
Walter Scott's translation of Goetz von Berlichingen, De 
Quincey's travesties, and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) 
a sealed book to English readers, save those who were will- 
ing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean mist. 
Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because 
he was the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The Life 
of Schiller, which the author himself depreciated, remains 
one of the best of comparatively short biographies ; it 
abounds in admirable passages (conspicuousl} 7 - the contrast 
between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at 
Weimar), and has the advantage to some readers of being 
written in classical English prose. 

To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept 
as the disjecta membra of the author's unpublished Histo- 
ry, there is little to add. In these volumes we have the 
best English account of the Nibelungen Lied — the most 
graphic and in the main most just analyses of the genius of 
Heyne, Richter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, 
who is recorded to have said, " Carlyle is almost more at 
home in our literature than ourselves." With the Ger- 
mans he is on his chosen ground; but the range of his 



viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 175 

sympathies is most apparent in the portrait-gallery of eigh- 
teenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a pro- 
scenium to his first great History. Among other papers 
in the same collection the most prominent are the Signs 
of the Times and Characteristics, in which he first distinct- 
ly broaches some of his peculiar views on political philoso- 
phy and life. 

The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's crit- 
ical power are exhibited in his second Series 1 of Lectures, 
delivered in 1838, when (pet. 43) he had reached the matu- 
rity of his powers. The first three of these lectures, treat- 
ing of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong- 
relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and 
civilisation : 

Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for us, they 
were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined towers, masses of stone, 
and broken statuary. . . . The writings of Socrates are made up of a 
few wire-drawn notions about virtue; there is no conclusion, no word 
of life in him. 

These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of 
the Hebrew on the Hellene. To the Romans, "the men 
of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling on their agriculture 
and road-making as their "greatest work written on the 
planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreci- 

1 Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anst- 
ley, this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and ob- 
vious authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while 
these sheets are passing through the press) of Wotton Reinfred is 
more open to question. This fragment of a romance, partly based 
on the plan of Wilhelm Meister, with shadowy love episodes recalling 
the manner of the "Minerva press," can add nothing to Carlyle's 
reputation. 



176 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

ates is Tacitus, " a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then 
follows an exaltation of the Middle Ages, as those in which 
" we see belief getting the victory over unbelief," in a strain 
suitable to Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent. In 
the struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens, 
Carlyle's whole sympathy is with Gregory and Hildebrand. 
He refers to the surrender at Canossa with the characteris- 
tic comment, "the clay that is about man is always suffi- 
ciently ready to assert its rights ; the danger is always the 
other way, that the spiritual part of man will become over- 
laid' with the bodily part." In the same vein is his praise 
of Peter the Hermit, whose motto was not the " action, 
action" of Demosthenes, but "belief, belief." In the brief 
space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the 
speaker allows awkward proximity to some of the self-con- 
tradictions which, even when scattered farther apart, per- 
plex his readers, and render it impossible to credit his 
philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent 
thought. 

In one page " the judgments of the heart 1 are of more value than 
those of the head." In the next " morals in a man are the counter- 
part of the intellect that is in it." The Middle Ages were " a healthy 
age," and therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong 
warrior disdained to write." "Actions will be preserved when all 
writers are forgotten." Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, 
" The great thing which any nation can do is to produce great men. 
. . . When the Vatican shall have crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's 
and Strassburg Minster be no more ; for thousands of years to come 
Catholicism will survive in this sublime relic of antiquity — the Divina 
Commedia." 

1 It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this in- 
stance a student of Vauven argues, who in the early years of the 
much-maligned eighteenth century wrote " Les grandes pensees vien- 
nent du cceur." 



viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. Ill 

Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid, 
— calling Don Quixote the " poetry of comedy," " the age 
of gold in self-mockery " — pays a more reserved tribute to 
Calderon, ventures on the assertion that Cortes was " as 
great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that it 
might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way 
in which the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with 
the Inquisition, broke itself on the Dutch dykes. After a 
brief outline of the rise of the German power, which had 
three avatars — the overwhelming of Rome, the Swiss re- 
sistance to Austria, and the Reformation — we have a rough 
estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even 
over Knox; Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Me- 
lanchthon are passed by. 

The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love 
of the sea appears in picturesque reference to the old rover 
kings, is followed by unusually commonplace remarks on 
earlier English literature, interspersed with some of Carlyle's 
refrains : 

The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at all 
. . . the same features appear in painting, singing, fighting . . . 
when I hear of the distinction between the poet and the thinker, I 
really see no difference at all. " Bacon sees, Shakespeare sees 
through," " Milton is altogether sectarian — a Presbyterian one 
might say — he got his knowledge out of Knox." "Eve is a cold 
statue." 

Coming to the well belaboured eighteenth century — 
when much was done of which the nineteenth talks, and 
massive books were written that we are content to criticise 
— we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, ma- 
terialism, argumentation, logic ; the quotation (referred to 
a motto in the Swiss gardens), "Speech is silvern, silence 
8* 



178 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

is golden," and a lond assertion that all great things are 
silent. The age is commended for Watt's steam-engine, 
Arkwright's spinning-jenny, and Whitfield's preaching, but 
its policies and theories are alike belittled. The summaries 
of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a 
few absurd. On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted 
as " a great poet born in the worst of times :" Addison as 
" an instance of one formal man doing great things :" 
Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, 
not unfeeling," who " carried sarcasm to an epic pitch :" 
Pope, we are told, had "one of the finest heads ever known." 
Sterne is handled with a tenderness that contrasts with the 
death sentence pronounced on him by Thackeray, " much 
is forgiven him because he loved much, ... a good, simple 
being after all." Johnson the " much enduring," is treated 
as in the Heroes and the Essay. Hume, with " a far dull- 
er kind of sense," is commended for " noble perseverance 
and Stoic endurance of failure ; but his eye was not open 
to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism 
of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and 
juster view, ended by admiring: 

With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more 
futile account of human things than he has done of the Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire. 

The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and 
marked by a somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The 
last lecture on the recent German writers is a mere rechauffe 
of the Essays. Carlyle closes with the famous passage 
from Richter, one of those which indicate the influence in 
style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humourist. 
" It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness 
are on the wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the 



viil] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 119 

livino- dream. Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the 
day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony to the 
speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed pene- 
tration, and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly 
shifting streams of his thought. 

Detailed criticism of Carlyle's Histories belongs to the 
sphere of separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible 
to take note of their general characteristics. His concep- 
tion of what history should be is shared with Macaulay. 
Both writers protest against its being made a mere record 
of " court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, 
of pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both 
find the sources of these outwardly obtrusive events in the 
underground current of national sentiment, the conditions 
of the civilisation from which they were evolved, the pros- 
perity or misery of the masses of the people. 

The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, or bat- 
tle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action — the world of exist- 
ence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and fades apart from 
these. 

But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the 
concrete. The latter presents us with pictures to illustrate 
his political theory ; the former leaves his pictures to speak 
for themselves. " Give him a fact," says Emerson, " he 
loaded you with thanks ; a theory, with ridicule or even 
abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was 
philosophy teaching by examples. He himself defines it 
as " the essence of innumerable biographies." He indi- 
vidualises everything he meets ; his dislike of abstractions 
is everywhere extreme. Thus, while other writers have ex- 
panded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history 
into biography. Even most biographies are too vague for 



180 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

him. He delights in Boswell : he glides over their gen- 
eralisations to pick out some previously obscure record from 
Clarendon or Hume. Even in the French Revolution, where 
the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives 
most prominence to their leaders. They march past us, 
labelled with strange names, in the foreground of the scene, 
on which is being enacted the death wrestle of old Feudal- 
ism and young Democracy. This book is unique among 
modern histories for a combination of force and insight 
only rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh 
book of Thucydides, of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. 1 
The French Revolution is open to the charge of being a 
comment and a prophecy rather than a narrative: the read- 
er's knowledge of the main events of the period is too 
much assumed for the purpose of a school-book. Even 
Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been 
a happy hunting-field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom 
the mistake of a day in date, the omission or insertion of 
a letter in a name, is of more moment than the difference 
between vitalising or petrifying an era. The lumber mer- 
chants of history are the born foes of historians who, like 
Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic 
power of making the past present and the distant near. 
That the excess of this power is not always compatible 
with perfect impartiality may be admitted ; for a poetic 
capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and 
is liable to errors of detail ; but without some share of it : 

Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit 

Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. 

1 Vide a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's inter- 
esting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, Thomas 
Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkorner aus seinen Werken. 



viii.] MAN OF LETTEKS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 181 

Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what 
Sir Philip Sidney calls " old moth-eaten records," supplies 
material for the work of the historian proper ; and, occa- 
sionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as a rule, with 
too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to the 
French Revolution, one reviewer has found that the author 
has given the wrong number to a regiment : another es- 
teemed scholar has discovered that there are seven errors in 
the famous account of the flight to Yarennes, to wit : the 
delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the 
Queen ; she did not lose her way and so delay the start ; 
Ste. Menehould is too big to be called a village ; on the 
arrest, it was the Queen, not the King, who asked for hot 
water and eggs ; the coach went rather faster than is stated ; 
and, above all, infandum ! it was not painted yellow, but 
green and black. This criticism does not in any degree 
detract from the value of one of the most vivid and sub- 
stantially accurate narratives in the range of European 
literature. Carlyle's object was to convey the soul of the 
Revolution, not to register its upholstery. The annalist, 
be he Dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, " the devil " 
of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a 
demand on the imaginative faculty as that of the poet. 
Historiography is related to History as the Chronicles of 
Hollinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the Plays of 
Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have 
been the main source of his knowledge of English history. 
Some men are born philologists or antiquarians ; but, as 
the former often fail to see the books because of the words, 
the latter cannot read the story for the dates. The mass 
of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously 
referred to as the " Romance of History," provided it 
leaves with them an accurate impression, as well as an in- 



182 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

spiring interest. Save in his over-hasty acceptance of the 
French blague version of " The Sinking of the Vengeur," 
Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of es- 
sential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, 
he was a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though 
occasionally an impetuous writer; his graver errors are 
those of emotional misinterpretation. It has been observed 
that, while contemning Robespierre, he has extenuated the 
guilt of Danton as one of the main authors of the Septem- 
ber massacres, and, more general ty, that " his quickness 
and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." 
But his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in 
our language. The French Revolution is a series of flame- 
pictures ; every page is on fire ; we read the whole as if 
listening to successive volleys of artillery; nowhere has such 
a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book 
alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric : " the figures of most 
historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole 
substance runs through any hole that criticism may tear in 
them ; but Carlyle's are so real that if you prick them they 
bleed." 

When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his 
Essays, he is apt to thrust his own views on his subject 
and on his readers; but, unlike De Quincey, who had a 
like love of excursus, he comes to the point before the 
close. The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Cole- 
ridge, of starting from no premises and arriving at no con- 
clusion ; the other, in his capacity as a critic, arrives at a 
conclusion, though sometimes from questionable premises. 
It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than 
condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a his- 
tory of the Civil Wars for Oliver Cromwell's Letters and 
Speeches. The events of the period, whose issues the writer 



viil] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 183 

has firmly grasped, are brought into prominence mainly as 
they elucidate the career of his hero ; but the " elucida- 
tions " have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. 
No single work has gone so far to reverse a traditional es- 
timate. The old current conceptions of the Protector are 
refuted out of his own mouth ; but it was left for his edit- 
or to restore life to the half-forgotten records, and sweep 
away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a great 
though rugged character. Cromwell has been generally 
accepted in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece — a judgment 
due to the fact of its being, among the author's mature 
works, the least apparently opposed to the theological 
views prevalent in the north of our island. In reality — 
though containing some of his finest descriptions and bat- 
tle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar" — it is the least 
artistic of his achievements, being overladen with detail 
and superabounding in extract. A good critic 1 has said 
that it was a labour of love, like Spedding's Bacon; but 
that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in both works, 
has " some of the defects of lovers' letters to those to whom 
they are not addressed." Carlyle has established that 
Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of falsehood, but a 
man of truth :" he has thrown doubts on his being a fanat- 
ic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that 
his later rule was a practical despotism. 

In Friedrich II. he undertook a yet greater task ; and 
his work stretching over a wide arena, is, of necessity, 
more of a history, less of a biography, than any of his oth- 
ers. In constructing and composing it he was oppressed 
not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, 
but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a 

1 In St. James Gazette, February 11th, 1881. 



184 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

hero. He himself confessed, " I never was admitted much to 
FriedricbbS confidence, and I never cared very much about 
him." Yet he determined, almost of malice prepense, to 
exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian as " the last of the 
kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth century," 
and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal 
lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies 
and conveys the most brilliant and the most readable ac- 
count of a great part of the century, and nothing he has 
written bears such ample testimony to the writer's pictorial 
genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of an 
old man eloquent ; parts of the third volume, with its dif- 
fuse extracts from the king's survey of his realm, is hard 
if not weary reading ; but the rest is a masterpiece of his- 
toric restoration. The introductory portion, leading us 
through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy and 
political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the pro- 
cession of the half-forgotten host of German worthies — St. 
Adalbert and his mission ; old Barbarossa ; Leopold's mys- 
tery ; Conrad and St. Elizabeth ; Ptolemy Alphonso ; Otto 
with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund 
supra grammaticam ; Augustus the physically strong; Al- 
bert Achilles and Albert Alcibiades ; Anne of Cleves ; Mr. 
John Kepler — who move on the pages, more brightly 
"pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes inspired 
with life. In the main body of the book the men and 
women of the Prussian court are brought before us in full- 
er light and shade. Friedrich himself, at Sans Souci, with 
his cocked-hat, walking-stick, and wonderful gray eyes*, 
Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music ; Wilhelmina and 
her book ; the old Hyperborean ; the black artists Secken- 
dorf and Grumkow ; George I. and his blue-beard cham- 
ber; the little drummer; the Old Dessauer; the cabinet 



viil] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 185 

Venus ; Gravenitz Hecate ; Algarotti ; Goetz in his tower ; 
the tragedy of Katte ; the immeasurable comedy of Mau- 
pertuis, the flattener of the earth, and Voltaire — all these 
and a hundred more are summoned by a wizard's wand 
from the land of shadows, to march by the central fig- 
ures of these volumes ; to dance, flutter, love, hate, intrigue, 
and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied 
show-box in all history ; a prelude to a series of battle- 
pieces — Rossbach, Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf — nowhere 
else, save in the author's own pages, approached in prose, 
and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. 

Carlyle's style, in the chiaro-oscuro of which his Histo- 
ries and three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally 
provoked much criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine 
says it is "exaggerated and demoniacal." Hallam 1 could 
not read the French Revolution because of its "detesta- 
ble " style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfect- 
ly limpid, is reported to have said, " No Scotchman can 
write English. C is a pest to the language." Car- 
lyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of 
Helps ; its peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an al- 
ways eccentric being; but it is neither affected nor delib- 
erately imitated. It has been plausibly asserted that his 
earlier manner of writing, as in Schiller, under the influ- 
ence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. " They for- 
get," he said, referring to his critics, " that the style is the 
skin of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old 
woman." Erratic, metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and 
therefore a dangerous model, " the mature oaken Carlylese 
style," with its freaks, " nodosities, and angularities," is as 

1 Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's Literature of 
Europe (containing among other fine criticisms the splendid sum- 
mary of "Lear") as a valley of dry bones. 



186 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

set and engrained in his nature as the Birthmark in Haw- 
thorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the Revolution 
in the form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like re- 
writing Tacitus in the form of Cicero, or Browning in the 
form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom obscure, the energy of 
his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness corre- 
sponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds 
often as it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten 
to break through the formal restraints of an ordinary sen- 
tence. He writes like one who must, under the spell of 
his own winged words; at all hazards, determined to con- 
vey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise no 
phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange 
tongues, and even to coin new words for the expression of a 
new emotion. It is his fashion to care as little for round- 
ed phrase as for logical argument: and he rather con- 
vinces and persuades by calling up a succession of feelings 
than by a train of reasoning, lie repeats himself like a 
preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The Amer- 
ican Thoreau writes in the course of an incisive survey : 

Carlyle's . . . mastery over the language is unrivalled; it is with 
him a keen, resistless weapon ; his power of words is endless. All 
nature, human and external, is ransacked to serve and run his er- 
rands. The bright cutlery, after all the dross of Birmingham has 
been thrown aside, is his style. . . . lie has broken the iee, and the tor- 
rent streams forth. He drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and 
never upsets. . . . With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his piet- 
ure all his moods and experiences, and erashes his way through shoals 
of dilettante opinion!, It is not in man to determine what his stylo 
shall be, if it is to be his own. 

But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a care- 
less or ready writer. lie weighed every sentence : if in all 



v,„ I MAN OF LETTERS, CI1IT10, AND HISTORIAN. ImV 

his works, Prom Sartor to the Remlnlacenm, you pencil- 
mark the most snggestivo passages you disfigure the whole 
book. His opinions will eontinue to be tossed to and fro; 
i,,,,, ttl ;lll ;iltl ;,i, be continually grows. J i<* was, let us 
grant, though B powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted 
though iii some aspects great moralist; but he was, in 

every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping his pencil "in 
the hues of earthquake and eclipse," now etching bis 

lOenes with the tender touch of a Millet. 

Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, 
"Nothing seems bid from those wonderful eyes of yours; 
those devouring eyes; those thirsty eyes; those portrait 
eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." Men of genius, 
whether expressing themselves In prose or verso, on canvas 
Of iii harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by 
some malignity of Nature, endowed with keener physical 

,.„,,,, than other men. They actually, not metaphorically, 
see more and hear more than their fellows. Oarlyle's super 
lensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; 
but the intensity of his vision was that of B bom artist, and 
to it we owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except 

those of Mr. Ruskin, in English prose, None of our poets, 
from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and Tennyson, have 
been more alive to the inlluences of external nature. His 
early letters abound in passages like the following, on the 
view from Arthur's Seat: 

The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with ths Fife bills iwelltag 
gradually Into ths Grampians behind; rough eragi and rude precL 
pioei at. <>ur feet (where not a hillock rears its head unsung) with 
Edinburgh at their bass clustering proudly over ber rugged founda- 
tione and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged blaoli m 
I itoneworh that itretch far and wide, and ibow like a olty of Paei v 
liU1 ,i i MW it mi last evening when the sun was going down, 



LSfl THOMAS OiBLYLE, [cbaf, 

and the moon's fins orescent, like a pretty silver creature ai it is, 
wm i Iding quietly above me* 



Compare with tbii the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of 
Middlebie burn, "leaping into its caldron, tinging a long 
better than Pasta's;" or that of the Scaur Water, that, may 
be compared with Tennyson's rersei in the valley of Cau- 
terets; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the tour of 
1842, with the photograph of the lace girl, recalling Sterne 

at hi:, purest ; Or the aCCOnnt Of the "atmosphere like silk " 

over tlu; moor, with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept;" 

or the few lines written at ThurSO, where "the. sea is al- 
ways one's friend ;" or the later memories of Mentone, old 
and new, in the I t.eminiacencca (vol. ii. pp. 880 840). 

The most striking of those descriptions are, however, 
those in which the interests of some thrilling event or 

Crisis of human life or history steal upon tin; scene, and 
give it a further meaning, As iii the dim streak of dawn 

rising over St. Abbs Head on the morning of Dunbar, or 

in the following famous apostrophe : 

evening sun of July, how at •■•ii;-: hour thy beams fall slant on 
reapers amid peaoeful, woody fteldi; on old women spinning Id cot 
tagei; on sblpi far out in the illent main; on balls and at the 
ranger! a at Versailles, where high rouged damei of the palace are 
even now dancing with double-jacketed Euuar officers; ami also on 
thli roaring Hell porch of an HoteUdu rille, 

Oarlyle LS, here and there, led astray by flu; love of con- 
trast; hut not even Heiurnh Heine has employed an tithe 
his with more effect than in the familiar passage on the 

sleeping oity in Sartor, beginning, "Ach uiein Lieber. . . 

it is a true mblimity to dwell here," and ending, " But l, 

on in Weil her, sit ahovc it all. I am alone- with the slars." 



vni I ma;; OF LBTTBai I, CRITIC, anj> iii;tokian Lf0 

\\r thought, leldom quite original, li oftan h pi iuii ItAtion 
01 mi vi v;ii, and owte much oi iti celebrity to It* iplendld 
broeodo. Sartor Bttartta iteeli otonpod the failure that 
wu At flrit threatened by Iti ccoentrlcity partly Prow iti 
noble paolon, partly because oi tba truth oi the "elotbei 
phlloiopby/' Applied to literature ai to life, 

Rl* deaorlptloni, too often earicaturei, oi men are equal 
ly vivni. They let the whole great mail oi FrUdrioh In 
aglow; they lighten thi tedium oi CromwtlPt lumbering 
di ipatchee; th< •/ give ;i heart oi Are to the Frtnoh Rsvo 
lution, Diokona'fl Tals oj Two Cltiti Attempt! And fulfill 
on 1 imaller wbatCarlylc achieved on 1 greatoi icali The 
historian makei ui lympatbiae with the reAl aotoi , 1 
more than the noveliit doei with the Imaginai 7 - baraotei on 
theiamettoge Prom the account oi the dying LouiiXVi 
to the " vvinii '.1 grape ihot" wbli h eloied the lut n ene oi 
it drama, tbi re I •• not a dull page Tboroigne de Mori 
court, Marat, Danton f Camilla Doimoullne, Mirabeau, Rob< 1 
pierref Talleyrand, Louie the Simple, above all Marie An 
tolni tte for whom * larlyli baa an aff< ction al in to tfiat of 
Mirabeau 10 1 Indie and ooloui the wene that we cannot 
e to feel weary of the phraaei with which they are li 
belled. 'J be authoi '••• i< ttei 1 ihow the tame po vi 1 oi baptii 
in", which heueedoften tounfaii exceie* We can no more 
forget Oount d'Oraay ai the "Pbcebui Apollo <*i Dandy 
1 in," Daniel Wob ter'a"browi like cllffe and huge blocb 
," or Wordiworth "munching ralilna" and rceognli 
ine no poet but bimei 11, or Maurice " Attacked by ; i pAro 
y -.1/1 '.1 mental cramp/' than w<; can diimlfi from our 
mem or lei " The Glaei ( 'oachman " or "The Tobacco Perils 
mi ui." 

Carlyle quotoii laying oi Rlcbter, that Luther'i wordi 
wore like biowij be bimeoli compare* tboN oi Burni to 



190 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

cannon-balls ; much of his own writing is a fusillade. All 
three were vehement in abuse of things and persons they 
did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not some- 
times coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Fal- 
stafl are, by strains of humour. The most Protean quality 
of Carlyle's genius is his humour: now lighting up the 
crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining over his serious 
thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as fine- 
ly quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. 
There is in it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of ap- 
parent contrast, even of contradiction, in life, of matter 
for laughter in sorrow and tears in joy. He seems to 
check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart in his 
sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, 
partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience 
to an instinct of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermon- 
ising and to cut the story short. Carlyle's grotesque is a 
mode of his golden silence, a sort of Socratic irony, in the 
indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and at him- 
self. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, 
ridicule of his own and other ages, now in droll reference 
or mock heroic detail, in an odd conception, a character 
sketch, an event in parody, in an antithesis or simile — 
sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a sentence. In 
direct pathos — the other side of humour — he is equally 
effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of 
Plato attacking the poets, for he is at heart the most emo- 
tional of writers, the greatest of the prose poets of Eng- 
land ; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to the 
actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more 
pathetic passages occur in literature than his " stories of 
the deaths of kings." The following among the less known 
of his eloquent passages is an apotheosis of their burials : 



viii.] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 191 

In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up the 
slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in the village of 
Hoxne ; seek out the severed head and reverently reunite the same. 
They embalmed him with myrrh and sweet spices, with love, pity, and 
all high and awful thoughts ; consecrating him with a very storm of 
melodious, adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears ; joy- 
fully, yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in it), 
commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and conversation 
while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope and Cardinals at 
Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, summing up as correctly 
as they well could, with Advocatus Diaboli pleadings and other forms 
of process, the general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in 
very fact led a hero's life in this world ; and, being now gone, was 
gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his reward there. 
Such, they said, was the best judgment they could form of the case, 
and truly not a bad judgment. 



Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more 
apt to be touched by its sorrows than amused by its follies. 
With a sense of brotherhood he holds out hands to all that 
were weary ; he feels even for the pedlars climbing the 
Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the 
frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of 
Paraguay or in a Prussian prince. He leads us to the 
death-chamber of Louis XV., of Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of 
Sterling, his own lost friend ; and we feel with him in 
the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid 
the din of arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he 
satirises and contemns old follies and idle strifes, a gen- 
tler feeling wells up in his pages like the sound of the 
Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real 
or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdrockh " left alone with 
the night" when Blumine and Heir Towgood ride down 
the valley ; of Oliver recalling the old days of St. Ives ; 
of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her Elector : 



192 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he 
felt from her hand, which lay in his, three slight pressures — farewell 
thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. 

There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his 
works, if in that of our literature, than the account of the 
relations of father and son in the domestic history of the 
Prussian Court, from the first estrangement between them 
— the young Friedrich in his prison at Custrin, the old 
Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourn- 
ing for Absalom — to the reconciliation, the end, and the 
after-thoughts : 

The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich hur- 
ried to a private room ; sat there all in tears ; looking back through 
the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now rapt away forever. 
Sad all and soft in the moonlight of memory — the lost Loved One all 
in the right as we now see, we all in the wrong ! This, it appears, 
was the Son's fixed opinion. Seven years hence here is how Fried- 
rich concludes the History of his Father, written with a loyal admira- 
tion throughout : " We have left under silence the domestic chagrins 
of this great Prince ; readers must have some indulgence for the 
faults of the children, in consideration of the virtues of such a Father." 
All in tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a lit- 
tle while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, ventures in to 
the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer ; " embraces his knees," 
offers weeping his condolence, his congratulation ; hopes withal that 
his sons and he will be continued in their old posts, and that he the 
Old Dessauer "will have the same authority as in the late reign." 
Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, strangely Olym- 
pian. " In your posts I have no thought of making change ; in your 
posts yes ; and as to authority I know of none there can be but what 
resides in the king that is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the 
breath out of the Old Dessauer ; and sent him home with a painful 
miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. At 
an after-hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, met by ac- 
clamation enough. He slept there not without tumult of dreams, 
one may fancy ; and on awakening next morning the first sound he 



viil] MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN. 193 

beard was that of the regiment glasenap under his windows, swearing 
fealty to the new King. He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emo- 
tion ; bustled distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pollnitz, who 
came into the anteroom, found him in this state, " half-dressed, with 
dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." " These huzzah- 
ings only tell me what I have lost," said the new King. " He was in 
great suffering," suggested Pollnitz ; " he is now at rest." True, he 
suffered ; but he was here with us ; and now— 

Carlyle has said of Dante's Francesco,, " that it is a thing 
woven as of rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The 
phrase, well applied to the Inferno, is a perhaps half-con- 
scious verdict on his own tenderness as exhibited in his 
life and in his works. 
9 



CHAPTER IX. 

carlyle's political philosophy. 

Perhaps the profoundest of Robert Browning's critics, in 
the opening sentence of his work, 1 quotes a saying of 
Hegel's, " A great man condemns the world to the task 
of explaining him;" adding, "The condemnation is a 
double one, and it generally falls heaviest on the great 
man himself who has to submit to explanation." " Cous- 
in," the graceful Eclectic is reported to have said to 
the great Philosopher, "Will you oblige me by stating 
the results of your teaching in a few sentences?" and 
to have received the reply, " It is not easy, especially in 
French." 

The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt 
to systematise Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have 
seen, intolerant of system. His mathematical attainment 
and his antipathy to logical methods, beyond the lines 
of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often 
sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contra- 
dictions in his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and 
his practically tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, 
he was never a close reasoner ; in all that relates to human 



1 Browning as a PhilosopJdeal and Religious Teacher, by Professor 
Henry Jones, of St. Andrews. 



chap, ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 195 

affairs he relies on nobility of feeling rather than on con- 
tinuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude of the 
prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines 
either to preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or 
of the priest. 

In praise of German literature, he remarks, " One of its 
chief qualities is that it has no particular theory at all on 
the front of it ;" and of its leaders, " I can only speak of 
the revelations these men have made to me. As to their 
doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be said ;" 
yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him 
" out of the blackness and darkness of death." This is 
nearly the feeling that his disciples of forty years ago en- 
tertained towards himself; but their discipleship has rarely 
lasted through life. They came to his writings, inspired 
by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of 
credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or 
mountain air, and found in them the key of the perennial 
riddle and the solution of the insoluble mystery. But 
in later years the curtain to many of them became the 
picture. 

When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising 
author, curiosity was rife as to his " opinions ;" was he a 
Chartist at heart or an Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a 
Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with Scott, or a Democrat 
with Burns — inquisitions mostly vain. He had come from 
the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange ele- 
ment, into the midst of an almost foreign society, not so 
much to promulgate a new set of opinions as to infuse a 
new life into those already existing. He claimed to have 
a " mission," but it was less to controvert any form of 
creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes 
of belief. He raised the tone of literature by referring to 



196 THOMAS CAKLYLE. [chap. 

higher standards than these currently accepted ; he tried 
to elevate men's minds to the contemplation of something 
better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity 
of lip-services ; he insisted that the matter of most conse- 
quence was the grip with which they held their convictions 
and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which 
they could lay their hands in loyalty to some nobler faith. 
He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but 
obstructive ; that it is only 

When half-gods go, the gods arrive. 

But his manner of reading these important lessons ad- 
mitted the retort that he himself was content rather to 
dwell on what is not than to discover what is true. " Be- 
lief," he reiterates, is the cure for all the worst of human 
ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities 
and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It 
means that we are not entitled to regard ourselves as the 
centres of the universe ; that we are but atoms of space 
and time, with relations infinite beyond our personalities ; 
that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is the 
sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation 
of the continuity of history and life, our faith and acqui- 
escence in some universal law. This truth, often set forth 

By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, 

no one has enforced with such eloquence as Carlyle ; but 
though he founded a dynasty of ideas, they are compara- 
tively few ; like a group of strolling players, each with a 
well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many parts. 

The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 197 

his frequent golden nebulosity, but from his love of con- 
tradicting even himself. Dr. Johnson confessed to Bos- 
well that when arguing in his dreams he was often worsted 
and took credit for the resignation with which he bore 
these defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished 
were one and the same. Similarly his successor took lib- 
erties with himself which he would allow to no one else, 
and in doing so he has taken liberties with his reader. His 
praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest 
priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of 
"the writers of newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the 
real effective working church of a modern country ;" and 
his later expressed contempt for journalism as " mean and 
demoralising" — "we must destroy the faith in newspa- 
pers ;" his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism ; 
the teaching of the Characteristics and the Signs of the 
Times that all healthy genius is unconscious, and the cen- 
sure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself too little 
with mysteries ; his commendation of "the strong warrior " 
for writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediae- 
val monks against the king — there is no reconciliation of 
such contradictories. They are the expression of diverse 
moods and emphatically of different stages of mental 
progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. 
This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. 
At the close of his student days Carlyle was to all intents 
a Radical, and believed in Democracy; 1 he saw hungry 
masses around him, and, justly attributing some of their 
suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal 
for the oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. He 

1 Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in 
1819. 



198 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

began not only by sympathising with the people, but by 
believing in their capacity to manage best their own af- 
fairs : a belief that steadily waned as he grew older until 
he denied to them even the right to choose their rulers. 
As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's con- 
servatism in terms recalled in the Reminiscences. "He 
objected clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democ- 
racy a thing forbidden, leading even to outer darkness : I 
a thing inevitable and obliged to lead whithersoever it 
could." During the same period he clenched his theory 
by taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. 
"This," he writes to Macvey Napier — "this is the day 
when the lords are to reject the Reform Bill. The poor 
lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own 
otherwise inevitable enough abolition." 

The political part of Sartor JResartus, shadowing forth 
some scheme of well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, 
especially in the chapter on Organic Filaments, the writer's 
later strain of belief in dukes, earls, and marshals of men ; 
but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, contains mere 
vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About 
this time Carlyle writes of liberty : " What art thou to 
the valiant and the brave when thou art thus to the weak 
and timid, dearer than life, stronger than death, higher 
than purest love ?" and agrees with the verdict, " The slow 
poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive struggles 
of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood repre- 
sented by Emily Bronte to that of the famous apostrophe 
of Madame Roland. He proclaimed that liberty to do as 
we like is a fatal license, that the only true liberty is that 
of doing what is right, which he interprets living under 
the laws enacted by the wise. In 1832 he writes to his 
wife, " Tell Mrs. Jeffrey that I am that monster made up 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 199 

of all the Whigs hate — a radical and an absolutist." In 
the result, the Absolutist, in a spirit made after Plato's 
conception of various elements, devoured the Radical. 
The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his 
brief and became chief advocate on their side, declaring 
"we must recognise the hereditary principle if there is to 
be any fixity in things." As early as 1835, he writes to 
Emerson : 

I believe literature to be as good as dead . . . and nothing but 
hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three genera- 
tions. ... I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all 
along had ; it is becoming a kind of passion with me to feel myself 
among my brothers. And then How? Alas, I care not a doit for 
Radicalism, nay, I feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me ; 
Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two 
are the grand categories under which all English spiritual activity, 
that so much as thinks remuneration possible, must range itself. 

And somewhat later : 

People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, but of 
being a Tory, thank Heaven ! 

Some one has written with a big brush, " He who is not 
a radical in his youth is a knave, he who is not a conserv- 
ative in his age is a fool." The rough, if not rude, gener- 
alisation has been plausibly supported by the changes in 
the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and 
Wordsworth. But Carlyle was " a spirit of another sort," 
of more mixed yarn ; and, as there is a vein of conservatism 
in his early Radicalism, so there is, as also in the cases of 
Landor and even of Goethe, still a revolutionary streak in 
his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his instance, 
there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially 



200 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious 
party that a distinguished man has left still to persist in 
claiming him ; while that which he has joined accepts him, 
if at all, with distrust. Scotch Liberals will not give up 
Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly asseverating that he 
was to the last " a democrat at heart ;" while the represent- 
ative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground 
continues to assail him — "mit der Dummheit kampfen 
Gotter selbst vergebens." On all questions directly bearing 
on the physical welfare of the masses of the people, his 
speech and action remained consistent with his declaration 
that he had " never heard an argument for the corn laws 
which might not make angels weep." From first to last, 
he was an advocate of Free Trade — though under the con- 
stant protest that the greatness of a nation depended in 
a very minor degree on the abundance of its possessions — 
and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education ; while, 
in theology, though remote from either, he was more toler- 
ant of the dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the 
lower, than of the Ritualism of the upper, classes. His 
unwavering interest in the poor and his belief that legisla- 
tion should keep them in constant view, was in accord with 
the spirit of Bentham's rubric; but Carlyle, rightly or 
wrongly, came to regard the bulk of men as children re- 
quiring not only help and guidance but control. 

On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely re- 
volved. It appears, from the testimony of Mr. Froude, 
that the result of the Reform Bill of 1832 disappointed 
him in merely shifting the power from the owners of land 
to the owners of shops, and left the handicraftsmen and 
his own peasant class no better off. Before a further ex- 
tension became a point of practical politics he had arrived 
at the conviction that the ascertainment of truth and the 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 201 

election of the fittest did not lie with majorities. These 
sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage: 

Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to be a 
portentous embodied sham. . . . Whether the Tories stay out or in, 
it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, which means revolt, 
dissolution, and confusion, and a darkness which no man can see 
through. 

No one had less faith in the paean chaunted by Macau lay 
and others on the progress of the nation or of the race, a 
progress which, without faith in great men, was to him 
inevitably downward; no one protested with equal em- 
phasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Rev- 
olution. It has been observed that Carlyle's Chartism was 
"his first practical step in politics;" it is more true to say 
that it first embodied, with more than his usual precision, 
the convictions he had for some time held of the dangers 
of our social system ; with an indication of some of the 
means to ward them off, based on the realisation of the 
interdependence of all classes in the State. This book is 
remarkable as containing his last, very partial, concessions 
to the democratic creed, the last in which he is willing to 
regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means 
the best, expedient. Subsequently, in Past and Present 
and the Latter-Day Pamphlets, he came to hold " that with 
every extension of the Franchise those whom the voters 
would elect would be steadily inferior and more unfit." 
Every stage in his political progress is marked by a grow- 
ing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust 
set forth, with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences 
as the following : 

There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the Universe, 
9* 



202 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

How find it ? All the world answers me, " Count heads, ask Univer- 
sal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that will tell !" From Adam's time 
till now the Universe was wont to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, 
partially disclosing itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose 
number was not the majority. Of what use towards the general re- 
sult of finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be ? ... If of 
ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation, 
how in the name of wonder will you ever get a ballot-box to grind you 
out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men ? . . . Only by reducing 
to zero nine of these votes can wisdom ever issue from your ten. 
The mass of men consulted at the hustings upon any high matter 
whatsoever, is as ugly an exhibition of human stupidity as this world 
sees. ... If the question be asked and the answer given, I will gen- 
erally consider in any case of importance that the said answer is 
likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse of the 
same . . . for how should I follow a multitude to do evil. Cease to 
brag to me of America and its model institutions. ... On this side of 
the Atlantic or on that, Democracy is forever impossible ! The 
Universe is a monarchy and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, 
the ignoble in the low ; this is in all times and in all places the 
Almighty Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found 
a regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old arrangement of 
things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the consummation of no- 
government and laissez faire. 

Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant 
protest against the spirit of revolt. In Sartor we find : 
" Whoso cannot obey cannot be free, still less bear rule ; 
he that is the inferior of nothing can be the superior of 
nothing;" and in Chartism: 

Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to have 
other than formulas to go upon . . . those to whom millions of suffer- 
ing fellow-creatures are " masses," mere explosive masses for blow- 
ing down Bastiles with, for voting at hustings for us — such men 
are of the questionable species. . . . Obedience ... is the primary 
duty of man. ... Of all " rights of men " this right of the ignorant 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 203 

to be guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly — is the indisputablest 

Cannot one discern, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of 
ballot-boxes, and infinite sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the 
wish and prayer of all human hearts everywhere, " Give me a leader." 



The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely- 
negative aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the pos- 
itive, which is his Hero- Worship, based on the excessive 
admiration for individual greatness — an admiration com- 
mon to almost all imaginative writers, whether in prose or 
verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a rev- 
erence for the past, which is also a common property of 
poets. Antiquity, then Feudalism, according to his view, 
had their chiefs, captains, kings, and flourished or not as it 
followed them well or ill. Democracy, the new and dan- 
gerous force of this age, must be represented and then de- 
nominated by great men raised to independence over the 
arbitrary will of a multitude, to be trusted and obeyed and 
followed if need be to death. 

Your noblest men at the summit of affairs, is the ideal world of 
poets. . . . Other aim in this earth we have none. That we all rev- 
erence "great men " is to me the living rock amid all rushings down 
whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant lies there, the attainment 
of a truer Aristocracy or Government of the Best. Make search for 
the Able man. How to get him is the question of questions. 

It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, 
and hardly attempts a reply ; and his failure to answer inval- 
idates the larger half of his politics. Plato has at least 
detailed a scheme for eliminating his philosopher guardians, 
though it somewhat pedantically suggests a series of Chinese 
examinations : his political, though probably unconscious 
disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or 



204 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

sage who is to rule is not to be chosen by the majority, 
especially in our era, when they would choose the Orators 
who seduce and " traduce the State ;" nor are we ever told 
that the election is to rest with either Under or Upper 
House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a 
man of great force of character, whether representing our 
own opinions or the reverse, we should take him on trust. 
This brings us to the central maxim of Carlyle's political 
philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, give 
some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme 
of so much dispute. 

It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly 
ever put in practice by the original thinker. When his 
rank as a teacher is recognised, his words have already 
lost half their value by repetition. His manner is aped 
by those who find an easy path to notoriety in imitation ; 
the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like 
a badge ; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room 
of mirrors, half of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. 
That which begun as a denunciation of tea-table morality, 
is itself the tea-table morality of the next generation : an 
outcry against cant may become the quintessence of cant ; 
a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny ; the con- 
demnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proc- 
lamation of peace a bone of contention. There is an 
ambiguity in most general maxims and a seed of error, 
which assumes preponderance over the truth when the 
interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulae. 
Nowhere is this degeneraey more strikingly manifested 
than in the history of some of the maxims which Carlyle 
either first promulgated or enforced by his adoption. 
When he said, or quoted, " Silence is better than speech," 
he meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 205 

before you speak: rather lose fluency than waste words: 
never speak for the sake of speaking. It is the best ad- 
vice, but they who need it most are the last to take it; 
those who speak and write not because they have some- 
thing to say, but because they wish to say or must say 
something, will continue to write and speak as long as 
they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men are apt to 
misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit 
still and leave the " war of words to those who like it." 
When Carlyle condemned self -consciousness, a constant 
introspection and comparison of self with others, he theo- 
retically struck at the root of the morbid moods of him- 
self and other mental analysts; he had no intention to 
over-exalt mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It 
were easy to multiply instances of truths clearly conceived 
at first and parodied in their promulgation ; but when we 
have the distinct authority of the discoverer himself for 
their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. A 
yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a 
great writer misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, 
or states them in such a manner that they are sure to be 
misapplied. 

Mr. Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that Might is 
Right at various times and in such various forms, with 
and without modification or caveat, that the real meaning 
can only be ascertained from his own application of it. 
He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by 
" might " he does not intend mere physical strength. 

Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute force ; 
conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, what is 
he ? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not stronger than 
ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, nobler. . . . Late in man's 
history, yet clearly at length, it becomes manifest to the dullest that 



206 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

mind is stronger than matter, that not brute Force, but only Persua- 
sion and Faith, is the king of this world. . . . Intellect has to govern 
this world and will do it. 



There are sentences which indicate that he means some- 
thing more than even mental force ; as in a letter to Mr. 
Lecky, quoted by Mr. Froude (vol. iv. p. 288), "Right is 
the eternal symbol of Might;" and again in Chartism, 
"Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; 
but give them centuries to try it, and they are found to be 
identical. The strong thing is the just thing. In kings 
we have either a divine right or a diabolic wrong." But, 
on the other hand, we read in Past and Present : 

Savage fighting Heptarchies : their fighting is an ascertainment who 
has the right to rule over them. 

And again : 

Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these, 
once ascertained, puts an end to battle. 

And elsewhere : 

Rights men have none save to be governed justly. . . . Rights I will 
permit thee to call everywhere correctly articulated mights. . . . All 
goes by wager of battle in this world, and it is, well understood, the 
measure of all worth. ... By right divine the strong and. capable 
govern the weak and foolish. . . . Strength we may say is Justice 
itself. 

It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite 
definitions. Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated 
and enforced his own interpretations of the summary views 
of his political treatises. There he has demonstrated that 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 207 

his doctrine, " Might is Right," is no mere unguarded ex- 
pression of the truism that moral might is right. In his 
hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of 
strength, that strength is everywhere a property of virtue ; 
that power of whatever sort having any considerable en- 
durance, carries with it the seal and signal of its claim to 
respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the 
very act, established its right to be established. He is 
never careful enough to keep before his readers what he 
must himself have dimly perceived, that victory by right 
belongs not to the force of will alone, apart from clear 
and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its crude 
form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts 
as in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among 
ancients to question the institution of slavery, as Carlyle 
has been one of the last of moderns to defend it) more 
guardedly admits that strength is in itself a good — kcu 
eariy ael to Kparovv tv vTrepo^ri ayadou tlvoq — but leaves it 
to be maintained that there are forms of good which do 
not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of 
Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he 
only acknowledges those types of excellence that have al- 
ready manifested themselves as powers ; and this doctrine 
(which, if adopted in earlier ages, would practically have 
left possession with physical strength), colours all his His- 
tory and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort 
compels his homage. Himself a Titan, he shakes hands 
with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, Columbus, the fuligi- 
nous Mirabean, burly Danton dying with " no weakness " 
on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of 
Mohammed, Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I. — whose mere 
belief in his own star he calls sincerity — the atrocious 
Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, Brandenburg des- 



208 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

pots ; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious in- 
decision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our 
own Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judg- 
ments regard as the tyranny of conquest, and has for the 
conquered only a vce metis. In this spirit he writes : 

M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of the 
Saxons ; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him ; of the Celts gen- 
erally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into the mountains, 
whither they were not worth following. What can we say, but that 
the cause which pleased the gods had in the end to please Cato also. 

When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws 
no more light than others have done on the apparent re- 
lapses of history, as the overthrow of Greek civilisation, 
the long night of the Dark Ages, the spread of the Russian 
power during the last century, or of continental militaryism 
in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure 
we must bear in mind that success is from its very nature 
conspicuous. We only know that brave men have failed 
when they have had a " sacred bard." The good that is 
lost is, ipso facto, forgotten. We can rarely tell of great- 
ness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to 
tell of it would imply a former recognition. The might 
of evil walks in darkness : we remember the martyrs who, 
by their deaths, ultimately drove the Inquisition from Eng- 
land; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their 
fate," as a recent writer remarks, " that was the tragedy." 
Reading Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter 
on the Reformation, and noting that the Inquisition tri- 
umphed in Spain, while in Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia 
the new truths were stifled by stratagem or by force ; that 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful ; and that 
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 209 

Henry IV., we see its limitations even in the long per- 
spective of the past. 1 Let us, however, grant that in the 
ultimate issue the Platonic creed, "Justice is stronger than 
injustice," holds good. It is when Carlyle turns to politics 
and regards them as history accomplished instead of his- 
tory in progress that his principle leads to the most serious 
error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as 
meanness and imbecility ; but he cannot see it in the 
strong hand. Of two views, equally correct, "evil is 
weakness," such evil as sloth, and "corruptio optimi pes- 
sima," such evil as tyranny — he only recognises the first. 
Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no 
word of censure for the more settled form of anarchy 
which announced, "Order reigns at Warsaw." He refuses 
his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, and holds that if 
races are trodden underfoot, they are <pva£i dovXot . . . 
Svvctfxevoi aWov elvat; they who have allowed themselves 
to be subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of " oppressed 
nationalities " was to him mere cant. His Providence is 
on the side of the big battalions, and forgives very violent 
means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined to 
acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France ; 
but he accepted the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced 
to admit, almost with chagrin, that he had, " after all," 
substantially succeeded. 

Treason never prospers, what's the reason ? 
That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. 

Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of 
his contemporaries, the foundations of past greatness, his 

1 Vide Mill's Liberty, chap, ii., pp. 52-54. 



210 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

invectives and teaching lay athwart much that is best as 
well as much that is most hazardous in the new ideas of 
the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry- 
do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks for- 
ward with satisfaction to the day when a band of white 
buccaneers shall undo Toussaint FOuverture's work of liber- 
ation in Hayti, advises the English to revoke the Emancipa- 
tion Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans to lash 
their slaves — better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable 
by auction — not more than is necessary to get from them 
an amount of work satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. 
Similarly he derides all movements based on a recognition 
of the claims of weakness to consideration and aid. 

Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, 
Doing or suffering. 

The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a 
theory of government is obvious ; the strongest govern- 
ment must be the best, i.e. that in which power, in the last 
resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of a single 
ruler; the weakest, that in which they are most widely 
diffused, is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edin- 
burgh students commends Machiavelli for insight in attrib- 
uting the preservation of Rome to the institution of the 
Dictatorship. In his last great work this view is developed 
in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian 
history. The following conveys his last comparative es- 
timate of an absolute and a limited monarchy : 

This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle which has 
since gone to such sublime heights among us — heights which we be- 
gin at last to suspect may be depths leading down, all men now ask 
whitherwards. A much-admired invention in its time, that of letting 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 211 

go the rudder or setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of 
it, and discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the 
more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be drilled, and a 
nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants never came 
to much in the world. 

Among the currents of thought contending in our age, 
two are conspicuously opposed. The one says : Liberty is 
an end, not a mere means in itself; apart from practical 
results the crown of life. Freedom of thought and its 
expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by the 
equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes 
as constituting national vitality : and even when, as is 
sometimes the case, Liberty sets itself against improve- 
ments for a time, it ultimately accomplishes more than any 
reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer restraints 
that are imposed from without on human beings the bet- 
ter : the province of law is only to restrain men from vio- 
lently or fraudulently invading the province of other men. 
This view is maintained and in great measure sustained by 
J. S. Mill in his Liberty, the Areopagitica of the nineteenth 
century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically 
set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von 
Humboldt on The Sphere and Duties of Government. These 
writers are followed with various reserves by Grote, Buckle, 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill writes : 

The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people themselves 
govern; but that they have security for good government. This 
security they can only have by retaining in their own hands the ulti- 
mate control. The people ought to be masters employing servants 
more skilful than themselves. 1 

1 It should be noted that Mill lays as great stress, and a more 
practical stress, on Individualism as Carlyle does. He has the same 



212 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. 
Froude, Mr. Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially 
replies : 

In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above a fly ; 
the value of a human life is that of its work done ; the prime prov- 
ince of law is to get from its subjects the most of the best work. 
The first duty of a people is to find — which means to accept — 
their chief ; their second and last to obey him. We see to what men 
have been brought by " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the 
dreams of idealogues, and the purchase of votes. 

This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests 
on his absolute belief in strength (which always grows by 
concentration), on his unqualified admiration of order, 
and on his utter disbelief in what his adverse friend Maz- 
zini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as " collec- 
tive wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for 
this view : but, in practice, it involves another idealism as 
aerial as that of any " idealogue " on the side of Liberty. 
It points to the establishment of an Absolutism which 
must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in the 
absolute rulers or ceases to survive. Kparalv & eari ical p) 
diKalioQ. The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have 
been beneficent in times of revolution ; but their right to 
rule is apt to pass before their power, and when the latter 

belief in the essential mediocrity of the masses of men whose " think- 
ing is done for them . . . through the newspapers," and the same 
scorn for " the present low state of society." He writes, "The initia- 
tion of all wise and noble things comes and must come from individ- 
uals : generally at first from some one individual ;" but adds, "I am 
not countenancing the sort of ' hero worship ' which applauds the 
strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the 
world. ... All he can claim is freedom to point out the way." 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 213 

descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius to Commodus, 
it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe 
distance, the amount of good that may be associated with 
despotism : its worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suf- 
focates freedom and induces inertia, but it renders wholly 
uncertain the life of those under its control. Most men 
would rather endure the " slings and arrows " of an irre- 
sponsible Press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, 
the delay of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, 
than have lived from 1814 to 1840, with the noose around 
all necks, in Paraguay, or even precariously prospered 
under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's extraordinary 
father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. 

Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might 
and right " never leads, with him, to its worst consequence, 
a fatalistic or indolent repose; the withdrawal from the 
world's affairs of the soul "holding no form of creed but 
contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent 
optimist nor pessimist is apparent from his faith in the 
power of man in some degree to mould his fate. Not 
" belief, belief," but " action, action," is his working motto. 
On the title-page of the Latter-Day Pamphlets he quotes 
from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and 
Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, ' Well, 
God mend all !' — * Nay, by God, Donald ; we must help 
Him to mend it,' said the other." 

"I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on 
the publication of Chartism, " no, but one of the deepest 
though perhaps the quietest of Radicals." With the Tory- 
ism which merely says " stand to your guns " and, for the 
rest, " let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was 
nothing selfish in his theories. He felt for, and was will- 
ing to fight for mankind, though he could not trust them ; 



214 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

even his " king " be defines to be a minister or servant of 
tbe State. " The love of power," he says, " if thou under- 
stand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very- 
noble and indispensable love ;" that is, the power to raise 
men above the " Pig Philosophy," the worship of clothes, 
the acquiescence in wrong. " The world is not here for 
me, but I for it." " Thou shalt is written upon life in 
characters as terrible as thou shalt not ;" are protests against 
the mere negative virtues which religionists are wont un- 
duly to exalt. 

Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German 
poetry ; in the sphere of common life and politics he made 
use of plain prose, and often proved himself as shrewd as 
any of his northern race. An excessively " good hater," 
his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the ab- 
stract they are always so; but about the abstract there is 
no dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike 
shams, hypocrisies, phantoms — by whatever tiresomely re- 
iterated epithet he may be pleased to address things that 
are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with 
the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admira- 
tion of an honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his 
successor appears in painstaking search ; his discrimination 
in the detection, his eloquence in his handling of humbugs. 
Occasional blunders in the choice of objects of contempt 
and of worship — between which extremes he seldom halts 
— demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of lit- 
erary and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any 
one, or anything, without a show of reason. To all gospels 
there are two sides, and a great teacher who, by reason of 
the very fire that makes him great, disdains to halt and 
hesitate and consider the juste milieu — seldom guards him- 
self against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, 



IX.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 215 

" He weaves and unweaves his wel> like Penelope, preaches 
by turns life and nothingness, and wearies out the patience 
of his readers by continually carrying them from heaven 
to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by 
caveats, but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in 
a way least to be expected. Much of his writing is a blast 
of war, or a protest against the philanthropy that sets 
charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the London 
Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find : 

I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war and 
cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the better for us all. 
As men no longer wear swords in the streets, so neither by-and-by 
will nations. . . . How many meetings would one expedition to Russia 
cover the cost of ? 

He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of 
their " Constitution," for having no Government ; and yet 
admitted that what he called their anarchy had done per- 
haps more than anything else could have done to subdue 
the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the " rights of 
women," their demand for the suffrage, and the cohue of 
female authors, expressing himself in terms of ridiculous 
ridicule of such writers as Mrs. Austin, George Sand, and 
George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated the claim of 
women to a recognised medical education. He reviled 
" Model Prisons " as pampering institutes of " a universal 
sluggard and scoundrel amalgamation society," and yet sel- 
dom passed on the streets one of the " Devil's elect " with- 
out giving him a penny. He set himself against every law 
or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the 
poor : there was no more consistent advocate of the aboli- 
tion of the " Game Laws." Emerson says of the mediaeval 
architects, " they builded better than they knew." Carlyle 



216 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

felt more softly than he said, and could not have been 
trusted to execute one of his own Rbadamanthine decrees. 1 
Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the 
despised humanitarian. Everything that he has written 
on " The Condition of England Question " has a practical 
bearing, and many of his suggestions have found a place 
on our code, vindicating the assertion of the Times of the 
day after his death, that " the novelties and paradoxes of 
1846 are to a large extent nothing but the good-sense of 
1881." Such are: — his insistence on affording every facil- 
ity for merit to rise from the ranks, partially embodied in 
the Abolition of Purchase Act; his advocacy of State- 
aided Emigration, of administrative and civil service Re- 
form — the abolition of " the circumlocution office " in 
Downing Street — of the institution of a Minister of Edu- 
cation ; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights of 
landowners — the theme of so many Land Acts; his en- 
larging on the superintendence of labour — made practical 
in Factory and Limited Hours' Bills — on care of the really 
destitute, on the better housing of the poor, on the regu- 
lation of weights and measures; his general contention 
for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and 
the executive bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find 
a way to public life for men of eminence who will not 
cringe to mobs, has made a step towards realisation in the 
enfranchisement of our universities. Other of his pro- 
posals, as the employment of our army and navy in time 
of peace, and the forcing of able-bodied paupers into " in- 
dustrial regiments," have become matter of debate which 
may pave the way to legislation. One of his desiderata, a 

1 Vide a remarkable instance of this in the best short Life of 
Carlyle, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147. 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 217 

statute of limitations on "puffing," it has not yet been 
feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on 
advertisements, to realise. 

Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are 
dominant in Carlyle's political treatises. First — A vehe- 
ment protest against the doctrine of Laissez faire ; which, 
he says, " on the part of the governing classes will, we re- 
peat again and again, have to cease; pacific mutual divis- 
ions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone, will no longer 
suffice;" a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the 
Trades-union wars, of which he failed to see the issue. 
He is so strongly in favor of Free-trade between nations 
that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared to make it 
compulsory. " All men," he writes in Past and Present, 
"trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are 
even bound to do it. Our friends of China, who refused 
to trade, had we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot 
at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, man 
and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has 
no trust ; he will not leave " supply and demand " to ad- 
just their relations. The result of doing so is, he holds, 
the scramble between Capital for larger interest and Labour 
for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will grind 
the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. 

Second — As a corollary to the abolition of Laissez faire, 
he advocates the Organisation of Labour, " the problem 
of the whole future to all who will pretend to govern 
men." The phrase from its vagueness has naturally pro- 
voked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of Polit- 
ical Economists withheld him from studying their works ; 
and he seems ignorant of the advances that have been 
made by the " dismal science," or of what it has proved and 
disproved. Consequently, while brought in evidence by 
10 



218 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Com- 
munists alike, all they can say is that he has given to 
their protest against the existing state of the commercial 
world a more eloquent expression than their own. He 
has no compact scheme — as that of St. Simon or Fourier, 
or Owen — few such definite proposals as those of Karl 
Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka or Gronlund, or even William 
Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view that " the 
restraints of communism are weak in comparison with 
those of capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward 
to some golden age ; he has given emphatic support to a 
copartnership of employers and employed, in which the 
profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of 
equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ 
those who are out of work in public undertakings. 

Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of industry. 
I will lead you to the Irish bogs . . . English fox-covers . . . New 
Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch hill-sides which, as yet feed 
only sheep . . . thousands of square miles . . . destined yet to grow 
green crops and fresh butter and milk and beef without limit — 

an estimate with the usual exaggeration. Carlyle's later 
work is, however, an advance on his earlier, in its higher 
appreciation of Industrialism. He looks forward to the 
boon of " one big railway right across America," a proph- 
ecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that "the 
new omnipotence of the steam-engine is hewing aside 
quite other mountains than the physical," i.e. bridging the 
gulf between races and binding men to men. He had 
found, since writing Sartor, that dear cotton and slow 
trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and im- 
mortality. 

Carlyle's third practical point is his advocacy of Emigra- 



ix.] HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 219 

Hon, or rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy 
for Over-population. He writes of " Malthusianism " with 
his constant contempt of convictions other than his own : 

A full formed man is worth more than a horse. . . . One man in a 
year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth will feed himself 
and nine others (?)... Too crowded indeed ! . . . What portion of 
this globe have ye tilled and delved till it will grow no more ? How 
thick stands your, population in the Pampas and Savannahs — in the 
Curragh of Kildare ? Let there be an Emigration Service ... so 
that every honest, willing workman who found England too strait, 
and the organisation of labour incomplete, might find a bridge to carry 
him to western lands. . . . Our little isle has grown too narrow for us, 
but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years. 
... If this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not 
everywhere else, a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to us : " Come 
and till me, come and reap me." 

On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly 
Colonies, " overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by 
many sounding seas." Carlyle would apparently force 
emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, and 
Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; 
but the problem of population exceeds his solution of it. 
He everywhere inclines to rely on coercion till it is over- 
mastered by resistance, and to overstretch jurisdiction till 
it snaps. 

His countenance of Autocracy may have disastrous re- 
sults in Germany, where the latest representative of the 
Hohenzollerns is ostentatiously laying claim to " right di- 
vine." In England, where the opposite tide runs full, it 
is harmless; but, by a curious irony, our author's leaning 
to an organised control over social and private as well as 
public life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve 
as an incentive to the very force he seemed most to dread. 
Events are every day demonstrating the fallacy of his view 



-220 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. ix. 

of Democracy as an embodiment of Laissez faire. Kant 
with deeper penetration, indicated its tendency to become 
despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is 
that of one, of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A 
Democracy where the many rule for the many alone, may 
be a deadly engine of oppression ; it may trample without 
appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the 
common good, establish and enforce an almost uncondi- 
tioned tyranny. Carlyle's blindness to this superlative 
danger — a danger to which Mill, in many respects his un- 
recognised coadjutor, became alive 1 — emphasises the limits 
of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity 
with an eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with 
equal force put to scorn the superstition of Equality ; but 
he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, some of which 
may find a mark the archer little meant. 

1 Vide passim the chapter in Liberty entitled " Limits to the Au- 
thority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the 
idea of " the majority of operatives in many branches of industry . . . 
that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good." 



CHAPTER X. 

CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS RELATION TO PREDE- 
CESSORS INFLUENCE. 

The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's 
Politics is traceable in his Religion ; though it is impossible 
to record the stages of the change with even an equal ap- 
proach to precision. Religion, in the widest sense — faith 
in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us — was 
the greater factor of his inner life. But when we further 
question his Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent 
or designedly vague. The answer he gives is that of 
Schiller: " Welche der Religionen? Keine von alien. 
Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin 
to think religion again possible for whoever will piously 
struggle upwards and sacredly refuse to tell lies; which 
indeed will mostly mean refusal to speak at all on that 
topic." This and other implied protests against intrusive 
inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their 
own secrets ; it is impertinence to " peer and botanise " 
among the sanctuaries of a poet or politician or historian 
who does not himself open their doors. But Carlyle has 
done this in all his books. A reticent writer may veil his 
convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. 
An avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interroga- 
tion as to his text. 

With all the evidence before us — his collected works, 



222 THOMAS CAELYLE. [chap, 

his friendly confidences, his journals, his fragmentary pa- 
pers, as the interesting series of jottings entitled " Spiritu- 
al Optics," and the partial accounts to Emerson and others 
of the design of the "Exodus from Houndsditch " — it 
remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We 
know that he abandoned the ministry, for "which he was 
destined, because, at an early date, he found himself at ir- 
reconcilable variance, not on matters of detail but on es- 
sentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. 
We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; 
that he went, as continuously as possible for a mind so 
liable to fits and starts, further and further from the faith 
of his fathers ; but that he remained to the last so much 
affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early as- 
sociations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist 
without dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a 
Puritan who had lost his creed." We know that he re- 
vered the character of Christ, and theoretically accepted 
the ideal of self-sacrifice; the injunction to return good 
for evil he never professed to accept ; and vicarious sacri- 
fice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught 
that every man must " dree his weird." We know that 
he not only believed in God as revealed in the larger Bible, 
the whole history of the human race, but that he threaten- 
ed, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point to 
give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate 
and in free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine 
war, and in the greater strength and triumph of good at 
some very far distant date. If we desire to know more 
of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by " the method of 
exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did not 
believe. This process is simplified by the fact that he as- 
sailed all convictions other than his own. 



x.] KELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 223 

Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent 
phrase, against all forms of Materialism and Hedonism, 
which he brands as " worships of Moloch and Astarte," 
forgetting that progress in physical welfare may lead not 
only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. Sim- 
ilarly he denounces Atheism, never more vehemently than 
in his Journals of 1868-1869: 

Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. 
Laws without a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. 
A.11 that is good, generous, wise, right . . . who or what could by any 
possibility have given it to me, but One who first had it to give ! 
This is not logic, it is axiom. . . . Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of 
algebraic specialities." . . . Canst thou by searching find out God ? I 
am not surprised thou canst not, vain fool ! If they do abolish God 
from their poor bewildered hearts, there will be seen such a world 
as few are dreaming of. 

Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to 
Napoleon's question, " Who made all that ?" and to Fried- 
rich's belief that intellect " could not have been put into 
him by an entity that had none of its own," in support of 
what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings 
as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and 
of morality to one having at root little confidence in his 
fellow-men. 

If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association 
of ideas, and there is no " Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I 
should say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out 
for hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. 

Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foun- 
dations of his faith and morals, with Napoleon and Fried- 
rich II. on his side, he had against him the advancing tide 
of modern Science. He did not attempt to disprove its 



224 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new ideal- 
ism ; he scoffed at and made light of them, e.g. : 

Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very sublime 
achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty much all that 
science in this age has done. . . . Protoplasm (unpleasant doctrine 
that we are all, soul and body, made of a kind of blubber, found in 
nettles among other organisms) appears to be delightful to many. 
. . . Yesterday there came a pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelu- 
jah on the advent of Atheism. . . . The real joy of Julian (the author) 
was what surprised me, like the shout of a hyasna on finding that the 
whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes my 
great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit for him. . . . 
Descended from Gorillas ! Then where is the place for a Creator ? 
Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, says our new Evange- 
list. . . . Nobody need argue with these people. Logic never will 
decide the matter, or will seem to decide it their way. He who 
traces nothing of God in his own soul, will never find God in the 
world of matter — mere circlings of force there, of iron regulation, 
of universal death and merciless indifference. . . . Matter itself is 
either Nothing or else a product due to man's mind. . . . The fast- 
increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold — does not even wet 
the soles of my feet. 1 

" Carlyle," says one of his intimates, " speaks as if Dar- 
win wished to rob or insult him." Scepticism proper fares 
as hardly in his hands as definite denial. It is, he declares, 
" a fatal condition," and, almost in the spirit of the inquis- 
itors, he attributes it to moral vice as well as intellectual 
weakness, calling it an " atrophy, a disease of the whole 
soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious 
habit of appeal to consequences, which in others he would 

1 Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes on this 
question with the agitation of one himself not quite at ease, with 
none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure. 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 225 

have scouted as a commonplace of the pulpit, is conspicu- 
ous in his remark on Hume's view of life as " a most mel- 
ancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean 
Paul, " heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second 
world a grave." He fails to see that all such appeals 
are beside the question ; and deserts the ground of his an- 
swer to John Sterling's expostulation, " that is downright 
Pantheism." " What if it were Pot-theism if it is true." 
It is the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sym- 
pathy for suffering to override his Stoic theories; but it 
vitiated his reasoning, and made it impossible for him to 
appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, religiosity 
of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called Ortho- 
doxy — whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High 
or Low ; he abhorred Puseyisra, Jesuitry, spoke of the 
" Free Kirk and other rubbish," and recorded his definite 
disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation and in Mira- 
cles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing 
has ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation 
of God's will and justice, and the stars in their courses 
are a perpetual miracle, is his refrain. This is not what 
orthodoxy means, and no one was more intolerant than he 
of rhetorical devices, on such matters, to slur the difference 
between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his 
own " Exodus from Houndsditch " might only open the 
way to the wilderness, he would allow no one else to 
take in hand his uncompleted task ; and disliked Strauss 
and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. " He 
spoke to me once," says Mr. Froude, " with loathing 
of the Vie de Jesus" I asked if a true life could be 
written. He said, " Yes, certainly, if it were right to 
do so ; but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to 
Emerson : 

10* 



226 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom I could 
unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of 
half-way-house characters, who I thought should, if they had not 
wanted courage, have ended in unbelief, in faint possible Theism; 
which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not 
but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed 
among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. 

What, then, is left for Carlyle's Creed ? Logically little, 
emotionally much. If it must be defined, it was that of 
a Theist with a difference. A spirit of flame from the 
empyreau, he found no food in the cold Deism of the 
eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image, 
from its pedestal, as by the music of the " Winter's Tale," 
to live among men and inspire them. He inherited and, 
coute que coute, determined to persist in the belief that 
there was a personal God — " a Maker, voiceless, formless, 
within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, 
" My belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, 
unsubduable, impregnable ;" and later, " Some strange be- 
lief in a special Providence was always in me at intervals." 
Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as 
good as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Eccle- 
fechan days. 

" To the last," says Mr. Froude, " he believed as strongly 
as ever Hebrew prophet did in spiritual religion," but if 
we ask the nature of the God on whom all relies, he can- 
not answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is He One or 
Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a 
mere " tendency that makes for righteousness ;" He is a 
guardian and a guide, to be addressed in the words of 
Pope's Universal Prayer, which he adopted as his own. 
A personal God does not mean a great Figure-head of the 
Universe — Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 2 27 

he became "a knight" of the Holy Ghost — it means a 
Supreme Power, Love, or Justice, having relations to the 
individual man : in this sense Carlyle believed in Him, 
though more as Justice, exacting " the terriblest penal- 
ties," than as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. 
He never entered into controversies about the efficacy 
of prayer; but, far from deriding, he recommended it 
as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 
he writes : 

I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened heart — 
it is my only form of prayer — "Great Father, oh, if Thou canst have 
pity on her and on me and on all such." In this at least there is no 
harm. 

And about the same date to Erskine : 

" Our Father ;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that brief 
and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an altogether 
new emphasis ; as if written and shining for me in mild pure splen- 
dour on the black bosom of the night there ; when I as it were read 
them word by word, with a sudden check to my imperfect wander- 
ings, with a sudden softness of composure which was much unexpect- 
ed. Not for perhaps thirty or forty years had I once formally re- 
peated that prayer : nay, I never felt before how intensely the voice 
of man's soul it is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious 
in poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an 
" After this manner pray ye." 

Carlyle holds that if we do our duty — the best work we 
can — and faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, 
God will do the best for us in this life. As regards the 
next we have seen that he ended with Goethe's hope. At 
an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his father's 
death (Reminiscences, vol. i., p. 65) he wrote : 



228 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told : yet 
under time does there not lie eternity ? . . . Perhaps my father, all 
that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both 
he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in 
some higher state of being meet one another, recognise one another. 
. . . The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial ex- 
istence daily grows plainer to me. 

On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife : " We 
shall yet go to her. God is great. God is good :" and 
earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the loss of his 
brother : 

What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. Your 
brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both you and I 
are. . . . Perhaps we shall all meet Yonder, and the tears be wiped from 
all eyes. One thing is no perhaps : surely we shall all meet, if it 
be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will, then is it not 
better so ? 

After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immor- 
tality came uppermost in his mind ; but his conclusions 
are, like those of Burns, never dogmatic: 

The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. " In 
my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are God you may 
have a right to say so ; if you are a man what do you know more 
than I, or any of us ? 

And later: 

What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor 
mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted to go 
farther." 

To Emerson in 1867 he writes: 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 229 

I am as good as without hope and without fear ; a gloomily seri- 
ous, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final chasm of things 
in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue 
mute on both sides), not caring to discourse with poor articulate 
speaking mortals, on their sorts of topics — disgusted with the world 
and its roaring nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting 
a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut 
my door against. 

There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's 
conviction that he had to make war on credulity and to 
assail the pretences of a formal Belief (which he regards 
as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple with real 
Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, 
the Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the 
miracle of miracles ; sight and knowledge leave us no " less 
forlorn," and beneath all the soundings of science there is 
a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind that qualified him 
to be the exponent of religious epochs in history. " By 
this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, " he has done so much to 
vindicate and bring to light the Augustan age of Christian- 
ity in England," adding that it is the secret also of the 
great writer's appreciation of the higher Teutonic litera- 
ture. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of " God 
in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to 
constrain unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good 
and evil are absolute opposites, are his links with the Puri- 
tans, whom he habitually exalts in variations of the follow- 
ing strain : 

The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest purpose 
awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. Not the body of 
heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to die, but the soul of it 
also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, 
has, for the present, passed away. 



230 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he re- 
garded with a feeling akin to worship, was in all essentials 
the reverse of a Puritan. 

To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, 
may be applied the phrase made use of in reference to the 
greatest of all the series of ancient books — 

Hie liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata qusevit; 
Invenit hoc libro dogmata quisque sua. 

From passages like those above quoted — his complaints 
of the falling off of old Scotch faith ; his references to the 
kingdom of a God who has written "in plain letters on 
the human conscience a Law that all may read;" his in- 
sistence that the great soul of the world is just ; his belief 
in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the 
divine depths of sorrow — from all these many of his Scotch 
disciples persist in maintaining that their master was to the 
end essentially a Christian. The question between them and 
other critics who assert that " he had renounced Christian- 
ity " is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomencla- 
ture ; it is hard exactlv to decide it in the case of a man 
who so constantly found again in feeling what he had 
abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was to the last 
an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's 
and of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies ; he at- 
tempts in vain to tear off the husk that cannot be sepa- 
rated from its kernel. He believes in no historical Resur- 
rection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts 
for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a 
faith in the Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He ab- 
jures half-way houses ; but is withheld by pathetic mem- 
ories of the church-spires and village graveyards of his 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS-INFLUENCE. 231 

youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet 
he gives way to his negation in his reference to " old Jew 
lights now burnt out," and in the half-despair of his ex- 
pression to Froude about the Deity Himself, "He does noth- 
ing." Professor Masson says that " Carlyle had abandoned 
the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of 
its Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain 
on the other side : but the Metaphysic of Calvinism is 
precisely what he retained; the alleged Facts of Revela- 
tion he discarded ; of the Ethic of the Gospels he accepted 
perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard 
the teaching of Christ as final. 1 His doctrine of Renun- 
ciation (suggested by the passage about the three Rever- 
ences in Meister's Travels) is Carlyle's transmutation, if 
not transfiguration, of Puritanism ; but it took neither in 
him nor in Goethe any very consistent form, save that it 
meant Temperance, keeping the body well under the con- 
trol of the head, the will strong, and striving, through all 
the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. 

Both write of Christianity as " a thing of beauty," a 
perennial power, a spreading tree, a fountain of youth ; but 
Goethe was too much of a Greek — though, as has been 
said, " a very German Greek " — to be, in any proper sense 
of the word, a Christian ; Carlyle too much of a Goth. 
His Mythology was Norse ; his Ethics, despite his prejudice 
against the race, largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code 
with the thunders of Sinai, not in the reconciling voice of 
the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us world-old truths 
splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance 
rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a 

1 A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's Life and Letters of Robert 
Browning, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic 
for general quotation. 



232 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

fine critic of morals, recognise that " morality also has 
passed through the straits." He did not really believe in 
Content, which has been called the Catholic, nor in Prog- 
ress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His 
often excellent practical rule to " do the duty nearest to 
hand " may be used to gag the intellect in its search after 
the goal ; so that even his Everlasting Yea, as a predeter- 
mined affirmation, may ultimately result in a deeper nega- 
tion. 1 

" Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, " stern daughter of 
the voice of God," has two aspects, on each of which he 
dwells with a persistent iteration. The first is Surrender 
to something higher and wider than ourselves. That he 
has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the 
self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly 
means that correct theories of our complex life are impos- 
sible ; but Matthew Arnold's criticism, that his Ethics " are 
made paradoxical by his attack on Happiness, which he 
should rather have referred to as the result of Labour and 
of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the 
pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The second 
aspect of his " Duty " is Work. His master Goethe is 
to him as Apollo to Hercules, as Shakespeare to Luther ; 
the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like the Schreck- 
horn rent and riven j the words of the former are oracles 
of the latter battles ; the one contemplates and beautifies 
truth, the other wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a 
limited love of abstract truth ; of action his love is un- 
limited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but that of 
Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. Laborare est 

1 Vide Professor Jones's Browning as a Philosophical and Religious 
Teacher, pp. 66-90. 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS—INFLUENCE. 233 

orare. He alone is honourable who does his day's work 
by sword or plough or pen. Strength is the crown of 
toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that girds us 
into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us 

men. 

The midnight phantoms feel the spell, 
The shadows sweep away. 

There are few grander passages in literature than some of 
those litanies of labour. They have the roll of music that 
makes armies march, and if they have been made so famil- 
iar as to cease to seem new, it is largely owing to the power 
of the writer which has compelled them to become common 
property. 

Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to 
the light and play of life, in which he admitted no d&a^opa, 
and only the relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more 
satisfactory than his conception of their sanction, which is 
grim. His "Duty" is a categorical imperative, imposed 
from without by a taskmaster who has " written in flame 
across the sky, ' Obey, unprofitable servant.' " He saw the 
infinite above and around, but not in the finite. He insisted 
on the community of the race, and struck with a bolt any 
one who said, " Am I my brother's keeper ?" 

All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, the very 
look of his face blesses or curses. ... It is a mathematical fact that 
the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity 
of the universe. 

But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and 
so failed to attain to the Optimism after which he often 
strove. He held, with Browning, that " God's in His heav- 
en," but not that " All's right with the world." His view 



234 . THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

was the Zoroastrian adavaroc ixayri, " in God's world pre- 
sided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a " di- 
vine infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who 
said "The world is a lie, but God is truth," landed him in 
an impasse ; he could not answer the obvious retort — Did, 
then, God make and love a lie, or make it hating it? There 
must have been some other power to erepov, or as Mill in 
his Apologia for Theism puts it, a limit to the assumed 
Omnipotence. Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, in- 
consequently halts between them ; and his prevailing view 
of mankind 1 adds to his dilemma. He imposes an "infinite 
duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an infinite pun- 
ishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind 
sets its hardest tasks to itself ; or that, as Emerson declares, 
"the assertion of our weakness and deficiency is the fine 
innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim." 
Hence, according to Mazzini, " He stands between the in- 
dividual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes 
the human being by comparing him with God. From 
his lips, so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry 
of the Breton mariner, ' My God, protect me ; my bark is 
so small and Thy ocean so vast.' " Similarly, the critic of 
Browning, above referred to, concludes of the great prose 
writer, whom he has called the poet's twin : " He has let 
loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight 
of the future : he has been our guide in the wilderness ; but 
he died there and was denied the view from Pisgah." 
Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently 



1 Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist Sulzer 
said, "Men are by nature good." " Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," ejacu- 
lated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er kennt nicht diese 
verdammte Rasse." 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 235 

Pantheistic ; but, in his view of the succession of events in 
the "roaring* loom of time," of the diorama of majesty girt 
by mystery, he has found a cosmic Pantheism and given 
expression to it in a passage which is the culmination of 
the English prose eloquence as surely as Wordsworth's 
great Ode is the high -tide mark of the English verse of 
this century : 

Are we not spirits shaped into a body, into an Appearance ; and that 
fade away again into air and Invisibility ? This is no metaphor, it is 
a simple scientific fact ; we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and 
are Apparitions ; round us as round the veriest spectre is Eternity, 
and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones 
of Love and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of 
beatified Souls ? And again do we not squeak and gibber and glide, 
bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad dance of the 
Dead — till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still home ; 
and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day ? Where now is Alexan- 
der of Macedon ; does the steel host that yelled in fierce battle shouts 
at Issus and Arbela remain behind him ; or have they all vanished 
utterly, even as perturbed goblins must ? Napoleon, too, with his 
Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other than the 
veriest spectre hunt ; which has now with its howling tumult that 
made night hideous flitted away ? Ghosts ! There are nigh a thou- 
sand million walking the earth openly at noontide ; some half-hundred 
have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy 
watch ticks once. Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider 
that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are in very 
deed ghosts. 1 These limbs, whence had we them ; this stormy Force ; 
this life-blood with its burning passion ? They are dust and shadow ; 
a shadow system gathered round our me, wherein through some mo- 
ments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. So 
has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation 
after generation takes to itself the form of a body ; and forth issuing 

1 One of the strangest freaks of literary heredity is that this phrase 
seems to have suggested the title of Ibsen's much debated play. 



236 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission appears. "What force 
and fire there is in each he expends, one grinding in the mill of 
Industry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of sci- 
ence ; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife in war with 
his fellow, and then the heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly Vesture 
falls away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, 
like some wild flaming, wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, 
does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick 
succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- 
created fire - breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Mane, haste 
stormf ully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the 
Mane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up. On 
the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped ; the rear of 
the host read traces of the earliest van. But whence, Heaven, 
whither ? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; only that it is through 
Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. 

Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sen- 
timent, belief, opinion, method of thought, and manner of 
expression, to other thinkers. His fierce independence, and 
sense of his own prophetic -mission to the exclusion of that 
of his predecessors and compeers, made him often uncon- 
scious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, 
who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he dis- 
posed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the He- 
brew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly unaffected 
by the writings and traditions of the East, which exercised 
so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He 
never realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece 
in moulding the speculations of modern Europe. He knew 
Plato mainly through the Socratic dialogues. There is, 
however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th, 
1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late 
in life, some portions of The Republic. " I was much 
struck with Plato last year, and his notions about Democ- 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 237 

racy — mere Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces . . . refined 
into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." 
The tribute conveyed in the comparison is just ; for there 
is nothing bat community of political view between the 
bitter acorns dropped from the gnarled border oak and the 
rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's garden. But the 
coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the mod- 
ern writer are among the most remarkable in literary his- 
tory. We can only refer, without comments, to a few of 
the points of contact in this strange conjunction of minds 
far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both pos- 
sessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate 
age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes : 
Laissez faire ; the growth of luxury; the effeminate pref- 
erence of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and 
life ; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian 
spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses 
of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly 
identical as the difference of the ages and circumstances 
admit. They propose the same remedies : a return to 
" purer manners, nobler laws," with the best men in the 
State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says 
Plato, are to be made guardians, and they are to govern, 
not for gain or glory, but for the common-weal. They 
need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a 
higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To 
this love they must be systematically educated till they are 
fit to be kings and priests in the ideal state ; if they refuse 
they must, when their turn comes, be made to govern. Com- 
pare the following declarations of Carlyle : 

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching class 
— these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff King — there did 



238 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

not society exist without those two vital elements, there will none 
exist. Whenever there are born Kings of men you had better seek 
them out and breed them to the work. . . . The few wise will have to take 
command of the innumerable foolish, they must be got to do it. 

The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, 
are further curiously at one : in their dislike of physical or 
mental Valetudinarianism (cf. Rep. Bs. ii. and iii. and Char- 
acteristics) ; in their protests against the morality of conse- 
quences, of rewards and punishments as motives for the 
highest life (the just man, says Plato, crucified is better 
than the unjust man crowned) ; in their contempt for the 
excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals 
(cf. Rep. B. viii.) ; in their strange conjunctions of free- 
thinking and intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that 
he who speaks against 1 the gods shall be first fined, then 
imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his impiety, put to 
death ; yet he had as little belief in the national religion as 
Carlyle. They both accept Destiny — the Parcas or the 
Norns spin the threads of life — and yet both admit a 
sphere of human choice. In the Republic the souls select 
their lots, with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The juxta- 
position in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account 
of the dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's " Nigger gone 
masterless among the pumpkins," and, for pathos, the im- 
age of the soul encrusted by the world as the marine Glau- 
cus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is 
another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes 
were few, and yet both leant to a sort of Socialism, under 
State control ; they both assail Poetry and deride the Stage 

1 Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; 
allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows 
disrespect to the State Religion. 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 239 

(cf. Rep. B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on "The Opera"), 
while each is the greatest prose poet of his race ; they are 
united in hatred of orators, who " would circumvent the 
gods," and in exalting action and character over " the most 
sweet voices " — the one enforcing his thesis in the " lan- 
guage of the gods," the other preaching silence in forty 
volumes of eloquent English speech. 

Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His 
Stoicism was indigenous ; but he always alludes with def- 
erence to the teaching of the Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the 
nearest type of the Philosophic King, must have riveted his 
regard as an instance of the combination of thought and 
action ; and some interesting parallels have been drawn be- 
tween their views of life as an arena on which there is 
much to be done and little to be known, a passage from 
time to a vague eternity. They have the same mystical 
vein, alongside of similar precepts of self - forgetf illness, 
abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence 
in the power of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes — 
ideas which brought both in touch with the ethical side of 
Christianity— but their tempers and manner are as far as 
possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more ad- 
miration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own 
intensity of love and hate and his own tenacity ; but be- 
yond this there is little evidence of the "Divina Corarae- 
dia" having seriously attuned his thought: nor does he 
seem to have been much affected by any of the elder Eng- 
lish poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to 
Spenser here and there with some homage, but hardly ever, 
excepting Shakespeare, to the Elizabethan dramatists. 

Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have 
found in Hobbes some support of his advocacy of a strong 
government ; but his views on this theme came rather from 



240 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

a study of the history of that age. Milton he appreciates 
inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just ; the latter, 
whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects 
his English master, and the points of resemblance in their 
characters suggest detailed examination. Their styles are 
utterly opposed, that of the one resting almost wholly on 
its Saxon base, that of the other being a coat of many 
colours ; but both are, in the front rank of masters of prose- 
satire, inspired by the same audacity of " noble rage." 
Swift's humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing 
scorn ; his contempt of mankind was more real ; his pathos 
equally genuine but more withdrawn ; and if a worse foe 
he was a better friend. The comparisons already made 
between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; 
they remain associated by their similar struggle and final 
victory, and sometimes by their tyrannous use of power; 
they are dissociated by the divergence of their intellectual 
and in some respects even their moral natures ; both were 
forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of 
debate ; but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, 
" all compact." The one blew " the blast of doom" of the 
old patronage ; the other, against heavier odds, contended 
against the later tyranny of uninformed and insolent popu- 
lar opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the in- 
fluence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French 
writers, J. J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion 
over Reason : in referring to the Past as a model ; in sub- 
ordinating mere criticism to ethical, religious, or irreligious 
purpose; in being avowed propagandists; in their "deep 
unrest;" and in the diverse conclusions that have been 
drawn from their teaching. 

Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German 
literature was, in some measure, inspired by the pride in a 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 241 

treasure-trove, the regard of a foster-father or chaperon 
who first substantially took it by the hand and introduced 
it to English society ; but it was also due to the feeling 
that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own 
perplexities, and at least their partial solution. His choice 
of its representatives is easily explained. In Schiller he 
found intellectually a younger brother, who had fought a 
part of his own fight and was animated by his own aspira- 
tions; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade 
of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised 
across many divergencies as his master. The attachment 
of the belated Scotch Puritan to the greater German has 
provoked endless comment; but the former has himself 
solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and 
pupil remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who 
only knew Goethe as one who had attained, and ignored 
the struggle of his hot youth on the way to attainment. 
Carlyle justly commends him, not alone for his artistic 
mastery, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of 
life, which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers 
of human thought than such more perfect artists and 
more passionate lyrists as Heine. He admires above all 
his conquest over the world, without concession to it, 
saying : 

With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once perturbed 
spirit is serene and rich in good fruits. . . . Neither, which is most 
important of all, has this Peace been attained by a surrender to Ne- 
cessity, or any compact with Delusion — a seeming blessing, such as 
years and dispiritment will of themselves bring to most men, and 
which is indeed no blessing, since ever continued battle is better than 
captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it warrior-like, still 
fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion still asserts " To die in 
strife is the end of life." 
11 



242 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

Goethe only ceased to fight when he had won ; his want 
of sympathy with the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the 
stump orators of his day, was genuine and shared by Car- 
lyle. In the apologue of the Three Reverences in Meister 
the master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike 
his pupil, verges on sentimental paradox, declaring through 
the lips of the Chief in that imaginary pedagogic province 
— which here and there closely recalls the New Atlantis — 
that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery 
and despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine — nay, even on 
sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to honour 
them, as furtherances of what is holy." In answer to Emer- 
son's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies : 

Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I ; nay, 
I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John Knox himself, 
could he have seen the peaceable impregnable fidelity of that man's 
mind, and how to him also Duty was infinite — Knox would have 
passed on wondering, not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word 
why I like Goethe. His is the only healthy mind, of any extent, that 
I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he who 
first convincingly proclaimed to me. ..." Behold even in this scan- 
dalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger 
and cant, it is still possible that man be a man." And then as to 
that dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself : con- 
sider whether misery is not ill health too, also whether good-fortune 
is not worse to bear than bad, and on the whole, whether the glorious 
serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane — as Light, 
the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. 

Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in 
accord with Carlyle was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of 
sayings — as " There is but one temple in the universe, and 
that is the body of man," " Who touches a human hand 
touches God" — that especially commended themselves to 



x.] KELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 243 

his commentator. Among philosophers proper, Fichte, iu 
his assertion of the Will as a greater factor of human life 
and a nearer indication of personality than pure Thought, 
was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The Vocation of the Scholar 
and The Way to a Blessed Life anticipated and probably 
suggested much of the more speculative part of Sartor. 
But to show their relation would involve a course of Meta- 
physics. 

We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the 
secret of life and its aims from his master Goethe : but the 
closest of his kin, the man with whom he shook hands 
more nearly as an equal, was Richter — Jean Paul der ein- 
zige, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly 
planted on German earth, a colossus of reading and indus- 
try, the quaintest of humourists, not excepting either Sir 
Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a lover and painter of 
Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have in- 
fluenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of 
queer titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, 
and endless digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream 
in the first Flower Piece from the life of Siebenkas, and 
that on New-year's Eve, are like previsions of Sartor, and 
we find in the fantasies of both authors much of the same 
machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of 
Schmelzle's Journey to Flatz might pass current for Car- 
lyle's own ; and it is evident that the latter was saturated 
with Quintus Fixlein. The following can hardly be a mere 
coincidence. Richter writes of a dead brother, " For he 
chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself 
among several others ; but these recoiled, and his shot forth 
with him, melted away as it floated under his feet, and so 
sank his heart of fire amid the ice and waves ;" while in 
Cui Bono we have : 



244 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

What is life? a thawing ice-board 
On a sea with sunny shore. 

Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of Fixlein, espe- 
cially the passage, " Then began the iEolian harp of Crea- 
tion," recalls the deepest pathos of Sartor. The two writers, 
it has been observed, had in common " reverence, humour, 
vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, and 
pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the 
Foreign Quarterly of 1830 might be taken for a criticism 
of himself. # 

Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magna- 
nimity in estimating his English contemporaries ; but the 
deliberate judgments of his essays were often more genial 
than those of his letters and conversation ; and perhaps 
his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew 
round him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful 
than his severity ; it is good for no man to live with sat- 
ellites. His practical severance from Mazzini was mainly 
a personal loss ; the widening of the gulf between him and 
Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been 
better qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. 
Carlyle was the greater genius ; but the question which was 
the greater mind must be decided by the conflict between 
logic and emotion. They were related proximately as Plato 
to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and their 
hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry- 
light," and his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally 
open to the charge of being a formalist, allowing too little 
for the " infusion of the affections," save when touched, as 
Carlyle was, by a personal loss ; yet the critical range indi- 
cated by his essay on " Coleridge " on the one side, that 
on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his 
friend ; and while neither said anything base, Mill alone is 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 245 

clear from the charge of having ever said anything absurd. 
His influence, though more indirect, may prove, save ar- 
tistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their assaults 
on Laissez faire, curiously combine in giving sometimes 
undesigned support to social movements with which the 
elder at least had no sympathy. 

Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived 
beyond the sea. He has been almost to weariness com- 
pared with Emerson, initial pupil later ally, but their con- 
trasts are more instructive than their resemblances. They 
have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked originality, 
uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional 
methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression ; 
but in Carlyle this is tempered by greater veneration for 
the past, in which he holds out models for our imitation ; 
while Emerson sees in it only finger-posts for the future, 
and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should 
wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates ab- 
straction, delights to dwell on the minutiae of biography, 
and waxes eloquent even on dates. The other, a brilliant 
though not always a profound generaliser, tells us that we 
must " leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, 
and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope, not in 
history . . . with the ideal is the rose of joy. But grief 
cleaves to names and persons, and the partial interests of 
to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a burden, 
and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks 
up at the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but 
exclaim, "It is a sad sight." The other is blown upon by 
the fresh breezes of the new world ; his vision ranges over 
her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under her light 
atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I 
will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a 



246 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

half-Germanised Scotchman, living near the roar of the me- 
tropolis, with thoughts of Weimar and reminiscences of the 
Covenanting hills. Emerson studies Swedenborg and reads 
the Phcedo in his garden, far enough from the din of cities 
to enable him in calm weather to forget them. " Boston, 
London, are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke ; so is soci- 
ety, so is the world." The one is strong where the other 
is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in the murk of clouds 
illumined by bolts of fire ; he has never seen the sun un- 
veiled. Emerson's " Threnody " shows that he has known 
the shadow ; but he has fought with no Apollyons, reached 
the Celestial City without crossing the dark river, and won 
the immortal garland " without the dust and heat." Self- 
sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of 
the one; self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The 
art of the two writers is in strong contrast. The charm 
of Emerson's style is its precision ; his sentences are like 
medals each hung on its own string; the fields of his 
thought are combed rather than ploughed : he draws out- 
lines, as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's para- 
graphs are like streams from Pactolus, that roll nuggets 
from their source on their turbid way. His expressions 
are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers are 
essentially ascetic — though the one swallows Mirabeau, and 
the other says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Roch- 
ester and " left the world in a minority." But Emerson is 
never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is ; and Carlyle is 
never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the 
hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and 
insists on justice without vindictiveness : wars and revolu- 
tions take nothing from his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz 
and Shakespeare against Luther and Knox. Careless of 
formal consistency — " the hobgoblin of little minds " — he 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS-INFLUENCE. 247 

balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, 
in progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as 
a limit to collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne 
as the spokesman of a practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom 
was justified by the fact that he was always at first on the 
unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. Casting 
his vote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide suf- 
frage, a mild penal code, 1 he yet endorsed the saying of an 
old American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman 
which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go 
to the bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft that will never 
sink, but then your feet are always in water." Maintaining 
that the State exists for its members, he holds that the 
enervating influences of authority are least powerful in 
popular governments, and that the tyranny of a public 
opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by vol- 
untary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, "to educate 
whom the State exists ;" but he regards them as inspired 
mouth-pieces rather than controlling forces: their prime 
mission is to "fortify our hopes," their indirect services 
are their best. The career of a great man should rouse us 
to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought not to obey, 
but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. " It is the 
imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting 
the impudence of power." 

It is obvious that many of these views are in essential 
opposition to the teaching of Carlyle ; and it is remarkable 
that two conspicuous men so differing and expressing their 

1 Carlyle, on the other hand, holds " that," as has been said, " we 
are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst 
of civilisation." His protest, though exaggerated, against leniency in 
dealing with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore 
the rigour of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so. 



248 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

differences with perfect candour should have lived so long 
on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging over 
thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to 
Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip 
to England) is, on the whole, one of the most edifying in 
literary history. The fundamental accord, unshaken by 
the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a testimony to the fact 
that the common perservation of high sentiments amid the 
irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and over- 
ride the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew 
Arnold has gone so far as to say that he " would not won- 
der if Carlyle lived in the long-run by such an invaluable 
record as that correspondence between him and Emerson 
and not by his works." This is paradoxical ; but the vol- 
umes containing it are in some respects more interesting 
than the letters of Goethe and Schiller, as being records of 
"two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual claims. The 
practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is 
very beautiful ; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole 
appears the better man, especially in the almost unlimited 
tolerance that passes with a smile even such violences as 
the "Ilias in nuce;" but Carlyle shows himself to be the 
stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. 
Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called 
anarchy might be more effective in subduing the wilderness 
than any despotism ; while the advice to descend from 
"Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete life is 
accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, 
Society and Solitude and the Conduct of Life, which Car- 
lyle praises without stint. Keeping their poles apart they 
often meet half-way; and in matters of style as well as 
judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into one another, 
so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to 



x.] KELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 249 

be sure of the writer. Towards the close of the corre- 
spondence Carlyle in this instance admits his debt. 

I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can speak 
with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. Truly Con- 
cord seems worthy of the name : no dissonance comes to me from 
that side. Ah me ! I feel as if in the wide world there were still 
but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own : as if the 
rest were all hearsays . . . echoes : as if this alone were true and 
alive. My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. 

Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed 
edition of his friend's work : " You shall wear the crown 
at the Pan-Saxon games, with no competitor in sight . . . 
well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and with na- 
tions for your pupils and praisers." 

The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns 
to him the first place among the authors of his time. 
No writer of our generation, in or out of England, has 
combined such abundance with such power. Regarding 
his rank as a writer there is little or no dispute : it is 
admitted that the irregularities and eccentricities of his 
style are bound up with its richness. In estimating the 
value of his thought we must distinguish between instruc- 
tion and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has 
taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answers 
must be few. This is a perhaps inevitable result of the 
manner of his writing, or rather of the nature of his mind. 
Aside from political parties, he helped to check their exag- 
geration by his own ; seeing deeply into the undercurrent 
evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he was 
of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust 
themselves — what has been called "the policy of drifting" — 
or of dealing with them only by catchwords. No one set 
11* 



250 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

a more incisive brand on the meanness that often marks 
the unrestrained competition of great cities ; no one was 
more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation 
of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity ; no one 
has assailed with such force the mammon-worship and the 
frivolity of his age. Everything he writes comes home to 
the individual conscience : his claim to be regarded as a 
moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an 
ethical teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly 
observed that he helped to modify " the thought rather 
than the opinion of two generations." His message, as 
that of Emerson, was that " life must be pitched on a 
higher plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that 
Carlyle was a moral force so great that he could not tell 
what he might produce. His influence has been, though 
not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any 
of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, 
certainly the most imposing personality. It had two cul- 
minations.; shortly after the appearance of the French 
Revolution, and again towards the close of the seventh dec- 
ade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of 
his works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne elo- 
quent testimony, and the more academically restrained 
Arnold admits that " the voice of Carlyle, overstrained and 
misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and compara- 
tively sound," though, he adds, " The friends of one's 
youth cannot always support a return to them." In the 
striking article in the St. James's Gazette of the date of the 
great author's death we read: "One who had seen much 
of the world, and knew a large proportion of the remarkable 
men of the last thirty years, declared that Mr. Carlyle was 
by far the most impressive person he had ever known, the 
man who conveyed most forcibly to those who approached 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 251 

him [best on resistance principles] tbat general impression 
of genius and force of character which it is impossible 
either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as 
Ruskin and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the 
range of his own metier, his master, and the American 
Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, confesses that " all 
modern Literature has felt his influence in the right direc- 
tion ;" while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of 
more intense though more restricted genius than the poet- 
politician, declares — " Carlyle alone with his wide humanity 
has, since Coleridge, kept to us the promise of England. 
His wisdom provokes rather than informs. He blows 
down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, like the 
Jothuns, to throw the old woman Time ; in his work there 
is too much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay- 
making under the sun. He makes us act rather than 
think: he does not say, know thyself, which is impossi- 
ble, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, 
no clear goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exag- 
gerates. Yes; but he makes the hour great, the picture 
bright, the reverence and admiration strong ; while mere 
precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal, on the 
morning after Carlyle's death, wrote of him in a tone of 
well-tempered appreciation : " We have had no such indi- 
viduality since Johnson. Whether men agreed or not, he 
was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were 
brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always 
in his pulpit and audible, he denounced wealth without 
sympathy, equality without respect, mobs without leaders, 
and life without aim." To this we may add the testimony 
of another high authority in English letters, politically at 
the opposite pole : " Carlyle's influence in kindling en- 
thusiasm for virtues worthy of it, and in stirring- a sense of 



252 THOMAS CARLYLE. [chap. 

the reality on the one hand and the unreality on the other, 
of all that men can do and suffer, has not been surpassed 
by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers may 
have done in definitely shaping opinion . . . here is the 
friendly fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean 
spark ; here the prophet who first smote the rock." Carlyle, 
writes one of his oldest friends, " may be likened to a 
fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and 
showed in word and action his notion of the proper atti- 
tude and action of men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and 
he has left his gospels." To those who contest that these 
gospels are for the most part negative, we may reply that 
to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the 
way to do. 

In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be 
unjust to a fresh thinker as with regard to his originality. 
A physical discovery, as Newton's, remains to ninety-nine 
out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a great moral 
teacher " labours to make himself forgotten." When he 
begins to speak he is suspected of insanity ; when he has 
won his way he receives a Royal Commission to appoint 
the judges ; as a veteran he is shelved for platitude. So 
Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, 
Bacon, in his Essays of the English, wisdom, which they 
each in fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been 
exaggerated, his partialities intensified in his followers ; his 
critical readers, not his disciples, have learnt most from 
him ; he has helped across the Slough of Despond only 
those who have also helped themselves. When all is said 
of his dogmatism, his petulance, his " evil behaviour," he 
remains the master-spirit of his time, its Censor, as Ma- 
caulay is its Panegyrist, and Tennyson its Mirror. He has 
saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, and the 



x.] RELIGION— ETHICS— INFLUENCE. 253 

practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life 
is ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more in- 
telligible than Browning, more fervid than Mill, he has 
indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. His works have 
done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, in 
both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pil- 
grims. Not a few could speak in the words of the friend 
whose memory he has so affectionately preserved, " Tow- 
ards me it is still more true than towards England that 
no one has been and done like you." A champion of 
ancient virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to 
Fichte, as " a Cato Major among degenerate men." Carlyle 
had more than the shortcomings of a Cato ; he had all the 
inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind ; 
but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The 
message of the modern preacher transcended all mere appli- 
cations of the text delenda est. He denounced, but at the 
same time nobly exhorted, his age. A storm-tossed spirit, 
" tempest buffeted," he was " citadel-crowned " in his un- 
flinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. 



APPENDIX. 

CARLYLE'S RELIGION. 

The St. James's Gazette, February 11, 1881, writes: 

" It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to be- 
lieve, in its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He 
never affected to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too 
manly and simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest 
transmutations of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which 
had so great a charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On 
the other hand, it is equally true that he never plainly avowed his 
unbelief. The line he took up was that Christianity, though not 
true in fact, had a right to be regarded as the noblest aspiration 
after a theory of the Universe and of human life ever formed : and 
that the Calvinistic version of Christianity was on the whole the 
best it ever assumed; and the one which represented the largest 
proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also thought 
that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded in 
expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the 
ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose system- 
atic neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. 

"Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist 
by stating his views plainly — indeed if he had done so sixty years 
ago he might have starved — the only resource left to him was that 
of approaching all the great subjects of life from the point of view 
of grim humour, irony, and pathos. This was the real origin of his 
unique style ; though no doubt its special peculiarities were due to 
the wonderful power of his imagination, and to some extent — to a 
less extent we think than has been usually supposed — to his famili- 
arity with German. 



256 APPENDIX. 

" What, then, was his creed? What were the doctrines which in 
his view Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, 
so ennobling to human life ? First, he believed in God ; secondly, 
he believed in an absolute opposition between good and evil ; thirdly, 
he believed that all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively 
in this great struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or 
bad ; fourthly, he believed that good is stronger than evil, and by in- 
finitely slow degrees gets the better of it, but that this process is so 
slow as to be continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences 
of various kinds — one of which he believed to be specially powerful 
in the present day. 

" God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Chris- 
tian God — still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ ; 
who, though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in 
his writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The 
God in which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a 
Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and 
personifying the elementary principles of morals — Justice, Benevo- 
lence .(towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance — to such a 
pitch that they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively 
the will of God. . . . That there is some one Avho — whether by the 
earthquake, or the fire, or the still small voice — is continually saying 
to mankind — ' Discite justitiam moniti; } and that this Being is the 
ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems 
to have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the 
trouble to refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Con- 
fession, and to divest them of their references to Christianity and to 
the Bible, he will find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle 
there is the closest possible similarity. . . . The great fact about each 
particular man is the relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in 
which he stands to God. In the one case he is on the side which 
must ultimately prevail, ... in the other ... he will, in due time, 
be crushed and destroyed. ... Our relation to the universe can be 
ascertained only by experiment. We all have to live out our lives. 
. . . One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a third a Goethe, 
a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves Cromwell. 
Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him 
or not are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not 
be asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through 



APPENDIX. 



251 



this mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in 
their true colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and 
hereafter ; the bad are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be 
possible such good as a man has had in him since his origin. Let 
us strike down the bad to the hell that gapes for him. °This we 
think, or something like this, was Mr. Carlyle's translation of elec- 
tion and predestination into politics and morals. . . . There is not 
much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in either body of doc- 
trine ; but there is a strange, and what some might regard as a terri- 
ble, parallelism between these doctrines and the inferences that may 
be drawn from physical science. The survival of the fittest has 
much in common with the doctrine of election, and philosophical 
necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, comes 
practically to much the same result as predestination." 



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